Marketing Pilgrim

Microsoft announced late yesterday the launch of a new mobile search offering—product search under their Live brand. Microsoft’s browser-based mobile product search, accessible from m.live.com

The Live product search page displays products available in online stores (though the “Near Santa Cruz, CA” in the screen cap below would indicate that brick-and-mortars are also searched), including prices, ratings and reviews. The search results also composite ratings on specific features of the products, including things such as ease of use, and report the results back to you.

A sample generic search results page:

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Travel search engine Kayak.com is paying $196 million to acquire its closest competitor SideStep.com. Both are search engines to help travelers find the best prices on airfare, hotels, and car rentals. Like most search engines, they make money with partnerships and advertising.

The deal was financed from many sources, starting with Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst Partners and Accel Partners. SideStep investors include Norwest Venture Partners and Trident Capital. New investors Oak Investment Partners and Lehman Brothers Venture Partners.

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Americans will spend upwards of $48 billion on consumer electronics this holiday. Many need some help deciding out what to buy. You can search Google for hours or look at comparison sites, or you can go to Retrevo to find that GPS or iPhone.

The site is a shopping search engine to help you find the best deals as well as reviews, and blog posts about products. You can choose to get advice from the experts or community. If you’re shopping for Black Friday deals they have a list. They aggregate product information where you can find lists of most popular lists from CNET, Amazon, PriceGrabber, and other sites.

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Microsoft has acquired comparison shopping engine Jellyfish, and it actually looks like a cool company!

I must admit that I’ve never heard of Jellyfish before. Considering the name, I wondered if the founders thought about the name association - “Buy with us and you’ll get stung!”.

Digging into the details, it appears Jellyfish is the type of shopping engine I wish I had found BEFORE Microsoft–’cos you just know they’ll screw it up.

So why do I like the sound of Jellyfish? Here’s what got my attention:

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It appears Scripps–the 100+ year old media company–isn’t having the level of success with online media it had hoped.

Acquiring online comparison shopping site Shopzilla for $525 million in cash in 2005, Scripps indicated it expected great growth from the company. Unfortunately, it appears tougher competition and increased costs have thrown them of course and now Shopzilla is struggling, according to Portfolio.com.

Shopzilla’s revenue in the second quarter fell to $59 million this year from $65 million last year, and profits were down to $6.8 million compared with $16.5 million a year ago.

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So I’m sitting here listening to some old school jams, reading my daily mundane marketing RSS feeds, and preparing something to put me out of my misery. But wait, what is this? A blog post, and not an article, that is more useful than any article I have read in a month (or longer)?

I’ve covered link cloaking before. It’s usually not hard to spot. Those that do it usually do so in excess. While discussing SearchEngineWorld.com and possible link cloaking David Naylor brings to light that Google is showing site => redirect => site links compared to Yahoo only showing site => site links with a backlink check.

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Traditionally, the website selling a particular product at the lowest price has a huge advantage over the competition. However, according to a recent study from Shopzilla, that may be changing.

The survey of about 2,000 online shoppers revealed that 49% of shoppers considered the price to be most important factor in making a buying decision. That is down from 59% in 2003.

So what factor is taking the pace of price? The answer may surprise you–18% of shoppers said that customer feedback is the most important factor. Only 7% picked customer feedback in 2003.

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I love it when other bloggers discover a new web site and then provide an in-depth analysis of it - it means that I can quickly pass on the information to you, dear reader, without having to think of new ways to say the same thing.

Over at R/WW, Alex Iskold does an excellent job in reviewing a new shopping search engine that uses heatmaps - a la Crazy Egg or the Enquiro search studies. It’s called Summize and here’s the summary of how it works…

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Read/WriteWeb continues to monitor the second tier of search engines. Last month, they published the top 100 alternative search engines. This month, they’ve updated the list for February, with 32 new additions.

The criteria to make the list:

1) The Search Engine should exhibit superiority to Google—not as a whole, but in just one particular area. . . . We are not arguing that any one of the 100 list members is a “Google killer”. Rather, that they should be matched against the appropriate corresponding part of Google. For example, TheFind is a shopping search engine and therefore should be compared to Google’s shopping search engine, Froogle. . . .

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Oodle will today announce the launch of the Oodle Index, a real-time pricing guide for online classified listings. When Oodle launched back in April of 2005, their goal was to consolidate the widely scattered classifieds space and provide users with a central location for searching and shopping for online classifieds. Almost two years later, Oodle has collected data from hundreds of millions of online listings and has launched the Oodle Index as a means to help shoppers better understand pricing trends and find those hidden classifieds bargains.

I had a chance to speak to Oodle CEO and founder, Craig Donato, earlier this week and he walked me through the various features the Oodle Index will offer at launch. Hoping to become the “Kelly Blue Book of Classifieds”, the Oodle Index will be integrated with Oodle’s search results and utilized by clicking the “Pricing” link. Users will have access to some neat interactive charts which will show pricing and inventory trends, tailored to their geographic location.

By clicking on the pricing charts, users will be able to instantly view listings available in a specific price range and get real time data on availability. For example, searching for a 2004 Honda Accord, with less than 30,000 miles on the clock, shows 281 listings in the New York area, with an average price of $18,205. Using the Oodle Index charts, users making this search will see that for an average of just $300 more, they can peruse more than 180 Accords built in 2005. It’s this type of transparency in the online classifieds space that Oodle is hoping to bring with the Oodle Index.

“Pricing in classifieds is very inefficient,” says Craig Donato. “Our vision is to be the shopping tool for classifieds.” Indeed, Oodle has access to a multitude of data points, including demographics of buyers - even able to understand car buying preferences of Republicans in California compared to Democrats in New England.

The Oodle Index is available in all geographic areas served by Oodle and will initially provide pricing data for cars, real estate and apartment rentals.

This will likely be the last news post until after Christmas. Here’s what’s caught my attention today.

1. Avinash Kaushik discusses the merits of javascript analytics over web log files.
2. Robert Scoble has re-discovered banner ads. He explains how Texas Instruments’ banner ads managed to catch his attention.
3. Mashable is reporting LinkedIn has secured new funding which suggests the company has a $250 million value.
4. Social media expert, Neil Patel, explains why some SEO web sites are being banned by Digg. Digg just doesn’t like SEO. Maybe the social bookmark site is receiving cash incentives from Did-It.

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Photo search technology company, Riya, has launched a new visual shopping search engine named Like. Now, I’m not sure if that’s meant to be “like, these boots are really cool” or “I really like those boots”, but either way, your online shopping experience is about to get a lot better.

According to Business Week, here’s how it works…

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