ShopWiki

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ShopWiki is a "next-generation" shopping search engine (or price engine) that officially launched on April 19, 2006.

ShopWiki claims to crawl more than 120,000 stores, making it, on paper, the shopping search engine with the largest index of stores.[1] It uses a Web crawler, artificial intelligence techniques, and an advanced data extraction algorithm to seek out product information from online retailers.[2] ShopWiki's technology extracts the structure of a page, recognizing which, if any, of the page's items are products available for purchase and correctly identifying the data associated with each product offered, including price, image, name, description and features.

Offers found through crawling constitute 100% of ShopWiki's index. The "first-generation" price engines depend on product information manually submitted by merchants via data feeds. Smaller stores, the "long tail," often lack the resources to prepare data feeds or pay the fees that most price engines levy for inclusion in their listings. ShopWiki crawls stores, does not accept product feeds and does not charge for inclusion.

The ShopWiki site features wiki buying guides. The buying guides, similar to Wikipedia articles, can be written and/or edited by anyone visiting the site. ShopWiki follows the trend of new shopping sites and engines adopting user-driven, or Web 2.0 (a disputed term) technologies such as social bookmarking, RSS feeds (which ShopWiki also offers), mashups and wikis.

The site's search technology is unique in understanding natural language queries. Users specify price ranges or product features within the search itself. Search terms can include "less than $300," "3-5 lbs.," "more than 3 megapixels," etc. The search results are two-tiered. Multiple offers for a single product, or SKU, are grouped together and displayed as a single product result. Clicking on the product result leads to a page of offers. The lack of normalization among product titles and descriptions on the Web complicates this grouping, called SKU consolidation, and produces some unevenness.

In June 2006, ShopWiki launched "Search by Color," a feature that employs content-based image retrieval (CBIR) to find products that match a user's specified color. Some e-commerce companies (notably Etsy) had earlier developed similar tools. However, ShopWiki claims to be the first among shopping search engines to use advanced image analysis. [3]

The launch was followed two weeks later with the announcement of user-generated video reviews. In these video clips, product owners demonstrate and discuss the product on camera. In order to encourage user submissions, ShopWiki offered monetary compensation ($50 USD) for the first 500 clips. [4] As of July 13, 2006, ShopWiki had accepted nearly 100 videos. [5]

ShopWiki is based in New York City (Silicon Alley).

[edit] References

  1. ^ Smith, Brian. "ShopWiki - CTO & Founder, Eliot Horowitz." Comparison Engines. March 2006.
  2. ^ Cherry, Lynn. "Has Shop Wiki Mastered the Crawl and Extract?." Search Vertically. March 2006.
  3. ^ ShopWiki Enhances Shopping Experience with First "Search by Color" Technology (Press Release).
  4. ^ Kirkpatrick, Marshall. "ShopWiki to spend $25,000 on user submitted videos." TechCrunch. June 2006.
  5. ^ Triglia, Judianne. "Free Money." Merge Digital. July 2006.

[edit] External links

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