Become.com has had their Affinity Index Ranking (AIR™) technology patent approved by the US Patent Office.
That is the news out of the Sunnyvale, California headquarters. It is big too, as Become.com is a fast growing comparison shopping engine who prides itself on this technology. This technology assigns relative rank values to links (web pages) by analyzing quality points in a nodal network.
“Rather than rank pages based on keyword saturation and position, AIR provides the most relevant pages higher positioning while avoiding vulnerability to the artificial Web that such conventional link analysis often falls prey to. ’We are extremely pleased about our patent. AIR technology provides a more intuitive ranking that isn’t spammed through keyword stuffing,’ says Become’s CEO and founder Michael Yang. ‘Our shoppers want relevant product information while comparison shopping on Become.com and AIR delivers it.’ “ - Become.com Press Release
It is a huge advance towards a spam free index, with no keyword stuffing.
What you need to know about Become.com:
Become.com is establishing itself as a player in the comparison shopping engine environment. Become is a classic model CSE that is great for consumer product research and comparison. Become accepts data feeds, FTP uploads and crawls the Web for shopping related pages to identify changes to existing pages. They are a CPC based pricing model with free setup. Minimum bids are required, based on the category your products.
Sign up your online store with Become.com now. Visit https://www.become.com/merchant/SignUp.aspx
So all you developer types who have been keen on the Yahoo! Shopping Product Submit API… step forward and get your new permissions from Pricegrabber. Better hurry though, as you have until March 11, 2010 to make the adjustment. Welcome to another round of Yahoo! outsourcing.
Announced earlier today, search engine giant Yahoo!, entered into what they call a “strategic partnership” with the well known comparison shopping engine, Pricegrabber, to power the Shopping Web Services API, including Shopping Results (the “Yahoo! Shopping Syndication Services). It will be interesting to watch how Pricegrabber handles this task. As Pricegrabber looks to gain heavily from this partnership, developers and merchants need to be aware that Pricegrabber is not a free Web services API.
This means merchants will only be able to get their products into Yahoo! Shopping through either Pricegrabber and Yahoo Search, which is provided by Bing. After the move of Yahoo Search to Bing, many thought it would be an obvious choice to outsource the Shopping Web Services API to Bing as well. Some speculate the move towards Pricegrabber for this task is based on the fact that Pricegrabber holds a larger database of products than Bing. Others point to the existing ties between Microsoft and Yahoo, with their current search relationship, and suggest it may have been a simple business decision to not go with Microsoft.
Merchants who use Google Merchant Center must be thrilled.
The executive team at Pricegrabber must be doing a big dance on the conference room tables. This will dramatically effect the market share of visits to comparison shopping engines. I can’t wait to see the effects.
Like Brian Smith, I too believed this function would have fallen to Bing. Heck, we have even been preparing for it here at Vertical Rail. Now, like Brian, I must admit I got that one wrong. Well, kinda. We all saw it coming. We just did not think it would be Pricegrabber.
As for the developers and merchants this will effect: At least they waited until after the holiday season.
