The New Yahoo!, Google, MSN Et Al. Battleground

A reader writes: "Kelkoo sold to Yahoo for 575 million dollars!" That, in and of itself is not that interesting - but combine that with Google's inclusion of Froogle into the front page, and things become more interesting. The comparison shopping field, including places like PriceGrabber (Disclaimer: OSDN is an affiliate of PriceGrabber) in the US, Kelkoo/Yahoo! overseas, Froogle, and MSN is heating up in competition. Now that search has been monetized, the next battleground for big money is in comparison shopping, beyond MySimon and other smaller ones.

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Re:who cares?

[iapetus]

Speaking as a denizen of the UK, Froogle sucks and Kelkoo is the clear winner.

What I'd actually like to see is a search engine that can tell which companies will ship to my home country, and work out the actual price of the product based on shipping, currency conversion and possibly import duties payable. That would be a lot more useful than a single-country search system, particularly when I don't live in that country.

Re:who cares?

[cshark]

We don't know that. Yahoo was king for several years. This recent sentament that google "owns" anything is stupid.

In any case, I think the real winners in this one are going to be those of us that figure out how to leverage these services for our online shops.

This is going to be a good holiday season :)

resellerratings.com

[enrico_suave]

Ressellerratings.com has some neat comparison shopping functionality. along with the the vendor rating info, it allows you to figure out what would be cheapest when buying several items including shipping.

Sometimes buying the cheapest items (e.g. from a pricewatch search) spread across different stores costs more when you are done than if you were to take a different approach and lump some of the purchases together.

another neat tool for amazon only is pricenoia some products might be cheaper overseas even after shipping/exchange rate.

*shrug* YMMV,

e.

Yahoo

[Ender Ryan]

Does anyone else find it funny that Yahoo is so cluttered and confusing (well, IMHO anyway) that it should really have a search engine just for itself?

Heh, nothing worse than trying to get stuff done and having to use a site that's just got too damn much on it.

Re:who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

its like 'kleenex' vs 'tissue paper' or 'xerox' vs 'facsimilie'

once you have that sort of name recognition, its damn hard to lose in the marketplace...

That's a bad thing not a good thing. The brand Kleenex is so diluted now that it simply means tissue. How'd you like it if you owned Kleenex and then heard everyone call every tissue Kleenex? All those tissues are benefitting from your trademark and you get nothing in return. That's why Google fought Webster's to have the verb form of Google taken out of the dictionary. They want to protect their trademark; not give it away to the public.

Re:The future of search.

[Psychic Burrito]

The "search through the webpages you've seen in the past 3 years" feature is a killer. I'm really looking forward using it.
To be useful, for me it had to be:
- Extremely low on the cpu
- keep the database small (10'000 webpages in 50MB or less)
- fast. Let me search in 2seconds tops.

Anyobdy already working on this?

Re:But what's so bad about that?

[The-Dalai-LLama]

The free advertising is great, the problem comes when your quality name becomes widely associated with shoddy products.

Example (completely fictitious and anecdotal): You spend a lot of time and resources to ensure that your Trampoline(tm) brand exercise products are fun and safe, but you don't pay enough attention to keep your trademarked name secure. The Profit-From-Kidz corporation releases a line of shoddy trampolines responsible for the deaths of 35 tots (really cute, photogenic tots). Global headlines trumpet the dangers of "trampolines", the market collapses, your company folds. If your trademarked name had been protected, headlines about the dangers of the Profit-From-Kidz Suspended Exercise Spring Mat would have had much less impact on your business.

Why do you think the makers of a certain type of interlocking construction toy are so rabid about protecting their trademarks? The PR difference between a headline about a child choking on a "construction brick" and a child choking on a Lego(tm - please don't sue me) is huge.

The Dalai Llama
when my cult goes international, I'll want 25 cents everytime somebody says llama...