Dulance

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Dulance was a price engine that specialized in searching for hard-to-find products often sold by small independent online retailers (“The Long Tail”).

[edit] Overview

Dulance was different from other price engines in that it relied on spidering, screen scraping, and information retrieval algorithms. Unlike other price engines, it did not require online retailers to submit structured product data feeds. Instead, it spidered their websites and extracted pricing and other product information using artificial intelligence algorithms. As often with artificial intelligence, it was not 100% accurate. However, this approach allowed searching, at least in theory, all or almost all online stores.

Traditional price engines that rely on structured product data feeds typically aggregate products from about 5,000 to 50,000 online stores, out of about 1 million. This implies that for over 90% of all online stores structured product data is not readily available. Hence, Dulance resorted to spidering the retailers’ websites. One component of Dulance’s engine, a statistical text classification algorithm, discovered and identified online stores. A generic web search engine is utilized to execute users’ searches. Another component examines the webpages found by the search engine and extracts prices, item condition (used/new) and few other product attributes. Data extraction was performed on-the-fly, without building a normalized product database.

The algorithmic approach has obvious disadvantages compared to the methodology of mainstream price engines: extracted data is not as rich and sometimes incorrect, product taxonomy is not available, and there are no store ratings. However, at this point there seems to be no other way to search The Long Tail for rare products and small merchants.

Dulance was unveiled, in an early Beta form, in September 2002. Additional features were added later on. RSS interface was added in November 2004. The service allowed users to register their wish-lists and receive notifications, via RSS, when at least one merchant on the web lowers the price below a specified limit. Dulance was only available for the US and Canada.

In April 2006, Dulance was acquired by Google, [1] [2] and apparently shut-down.

Other search engines which started around the same time like Pronto by IAC and TheFind / Fatlens are still going strong [3]