While the online comparison shopping market has been in a bit of a lull so far this year, today brings about a new competitor to the ever-so-crowded field. ShopWiki, a new shopping search engine and buying guide, launched today in beta form. Shopping comparison Web sites offer an increasing amount of exposure to online retailers, small and large.

In a written statement, the company said, "Unlike most shopping search providers, who rely on data feeds from retailers, ShopWiki uses advanced Web crawling and extraction technologies to index products from more than 120,000 stores."

"ShopWiki features more than 1,000 buying guides, one of the most complete collections of buying information on the Web. Each ShopWiki user is able — and encouraged — to post and edit buying guides, in the 'wiki' model of open collaboration made popular by Wikipedia," it said.

"ShopWiki puts shoppers first," said Kevin Ryan, ShopWiki Co-Founder and CEO, in the statement. "We found that consumers wanted three things from the next generation of shopping search engines: more coverage, better search, and complete shopping information. ShopWiki delivers. We want to index every product on the Web, and complement that with the best search and the most complete buying guides."

ShopWiki says its natural language search technology satisfies complex queries that most other providers ignore. Searches may contain price ranges and product features (such as megapixels, carats, watts, and gigabytes) written in plain English. Searches as simple as "digital camera $400" and "4 inch heels," and as layered as "Compact Flash Memory 2GB less than $200" and "400-600 watt amplifier," yield accurate results on ShopWiki, but not on any other shopping search engine, the company claims.

ShopWiki's comparison shopping site incorporates a sliding price range finder, which enables shoppers to narrow down price-based searches almost instantaneously.

"ShopWiki crawls more than 120,000 U.S. stores and is able to accurately extract data from any online merchant," added Co-Founder and Chairman Dwight Merriman. "We offer consumers the widest coverage of stores on the Web."

Unique Features, Toolbar Coming
ECommerce Guide tested ShopWiki and found some of its features to be quite innovative. The one tool that stood out is the sliding price range finder, located at the top of every search. Rather than repeatedly typing in additional price criteria for an item you are searching for, all you have to do is move either tab (see image above) to change the price range you are interested in. For example, if you happen to be looking for USB flash drives, the default search shows you all options from $1 to $101. If $101 is too high for you, simply slide the higher tab down until the maximum price target is $75. The page instantly refreshes showing you all available drives up to $75.

While the online comparison market has been very popular over the past year or so, so has the market for comparison shopping browser toolbars. In an exclusive, Ryan told ECommerce Guide today that the company would be part of that emerging market while also expanding beyond the U.S.

"We will be introducing a toolbar later this year and also expanding the web site into 25 countries by next year," he said.

For more information visit http://www.shopwiki.com/.

Devin Comiskey is the Managing Editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.

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