The dot-com era has to answer for a lot of crimes against the English language, including making the word ‘synergy” as common as oxygen and putting “e” before every noun and verb. But it also gave us the phrase “serial entrepreneur”, and that’s as good a way as any to describe the two men behind Become.com, a new search engine that crawls the Web for product reviews and ratings to fill shoppers’ need for dependable, objective research before they buy.
Become.com president and CEO Michael Yang and chairman and CTO Yeogirl Yun have been here before, poised to put innovative technology to work in a new way. The pair founded mySimon.com in April 1998, one of the early standout shopping hits on the Web thanks to the novel notion that buyers would want to compare prices on items to find the cheapest one. They sold that property to CNET Inc. in early 2000. Yun then went on to set up the Wisenut search engine, which was acquired by LookSmart in April 2002.
Yang says the need for a shopping research engine grew out of his personal experience in trying to identify the best LCD projector for his office about a year and a half ago. “I knew there were many different brands, but didn’t know which one was the best in the $2,000 price range,” he says. When advice from friends proved no help, Yang went to the Web for a Google search. “What I got back was a bunch of advertisements from merchants trying to sell me the models that they had in stock. There was no objective information that I could trust. That’s when I realized that people need a better research tool to identify the products they want to buy.” He met over dinner with Yun, who was attending law school at the time, and the pair talked algorithms and platforms, and a new search engine was born. Become.com went live in April.
The technology to provide that research-only view of the Web didn’t exist back in the days when Yang and Yun were getting mySimon on its feet. And in fact, Yang points out, mySimon users were happy enough just to find a place on the Internet where they could compare sale prices for an item they had already decided to buy. But in the intervening years, several things have happened to change the nature of shopping on the Web. For one thing, consumers have incorporated Internet search into their buying decisions both on- and offline to a much greater degree than they did back in 1998; the market for a vertical search devoted to buying decisions is much stronger now. For another, this extensive use of search has made shoppers anxious to find authoritative content about the products they’re researching. And finally, the growth of search engine marketing as an advertising medium means that if a shopping engine can draw enough users, it stands a good chance of finding a way to make some money.
Of course, those market drivers also inspire new competition. Shopping engines are springing up these days like mushrooms after a summer shower, so an entrant needs to have something pretty distinctive to stand out from the pack. Become.com’s edge derives from the fact that its indexes come directly from crawling the Web and not through feeds or paid placement. Become’s crawling technology spiders the Web to identify the sites that offer product reviews and ratings, while ignoring the large swathes of content that don’t relate to shopping. “We current crawl 3.1 billion pages on the Web from more than 40 million sites,” Yang says. That give Become.com the largest shopping index in the U.S., he points out, since Google’s 8 billion indexed pages include lots of content that is either international has nothing to do with product reviews or ratings. “Our index is just U.S., and just shopping.”
What this means in real terms can be seen, Yang says, by typing “television” into the query boxes of both Google and Become. On Google, doing that gets you pages of Web sites for networks, local TV affiliates and fan sites devoted to “Lost” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, surrounded by paid ads for deals from Pricegrabber and Overstock. On Become.com, you get five pages of product reviews from sources such as CNET, Engadget, Epinions, Amazon and PC World. (You also get paid ads for Overstock and the rest along the right rail, under the heading “Sponsored Links”; Become.com sells ad space on its pages through the Google AdSense network.)
“Google may index those product review pages, but they get buried beneath hundreds of pages that have nothing to do with researching a purchase,” Yang says. “We put them up top and ignore the rest.”
Besides its proprietary Web crawler, Become.com has another technological ace up its sleeve: Affinity Index Ranking (AIR), which Yang says is the most important advance in search ranking algorithms since Google’s PageRank. Unlike Google, which tends to rank pages based on their links and to downplay their content, Become.com’s AIR uses the context of Web links to determine their relevance and discards spam links intended only to raise a page’s Google rank. A third element of the process allows humans to set up certain pages-- for example the free content from Consumer Reports-- as the most authoritative; the computer can then learn to give those pages, and the links surrounding them, more weight in producing results ranking. If your page has incoming or outbound links to these expert pages, it gains credibility with the Become.com bots.
Users can search either on broad terms such as “digital camera” or on specific brands or even models, reflecting current thinking that some Web searches start before a buyer has settled on a brand name. Even the spell-check feature on Become has been optimized for shoppers; it can correct model numbers and SKUs as well as general terms and brands.
The next step, scheduled for this July, is to add a comparison-shopping component and merchant marketing features to the engine. Yang says that within two months product listings will be able to incorporate photos of the items and data from direct merchant feeds. Rather than taking fees for incorporating this merchant data, Become.com will charge a per-click fee for these listings. Yang says the company has already enrolled “a number” of vendors in this Become network but is actively recruiting more. He adds that Become.com might modify its current search-centric design to incorporate more online shopping elements, although that’s still up the air.
So are any plans beyond making Become.com a popular choice for consumer product search in the U.S. Plans do exist to expand the engine’s reach to England, continental Europe and Japan, Yang says, but they’re secondary to expanding Become’s content reach deeper into the Web and integrating product feeds from makers and sellers of the items most people want to buy.
As for competition, while both Google and Yahoo have shopping sites, Yang thinks Become has the focus—and the search algorithm—to do it better than they do. “Yahoo! and Google are active innovators in many areas, from e-mail to shopping to search to video,” he says. “But they have a hard time specializing. It’s a David and Goliath battle, but we can focus on one area. And we think we’re smarter about what we do.”