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InterviewsInterview with Rob Solomon of Yahoo ShoppingAn in-depth interview with Rob Solomon, GM & VP of Yahoo! Shopping, over at ComparisonEngines.com.
Interview with Rob Solomon of Yahoo Shopping
Interview With Michael Yang of Become.com
Starting To "Click" People have asked me, "what do you see in Become.com?" That, plus reactions ranging from "huh?" to "hmm..." from friends, reminded me to guard against any irrational exuberance here. I asked Michael Yang, Co-Founder and CEO of Become.com, how they plan to convert people who are unconvinced by the beta site. "Time will take care of that," Michael responded, "when people use it for their own shopping." He proceeded to illustrate this point with a recent Become.com success story. A frustrated shopper was trying to find product information and online retailers for a boat part. She spent over an hour searching Google and visiting their top results without success. Enter Become and their shopping-flavored search results. Within five minutes, her search was satisfied. That is all well and good, but what about people who do not look deeper than design? What if these people equate no new interface with no new functionality, and they do not dig in and discover the differences? To address these questions, Michael said they will roll out a "seamless integration of search and shopping" in the middle of this year. Favorite Searches In an interview at ZDNet.com, Michael mentioned the keyword "television" as a example of how Become.com was different than other search engines. For me, this example hit home better than any technical explanation, so I asked for more of his favorite search keywords, and he rattled off refrigerator, lcd projectors, hdtv, and laptop/notebook computers. I have linked these searches below for ease of comparison:
International Expansion Non-U.S. comparison shopping has been a hot topic this year. All of the established U.S. players have sites in the U.K., and many of them are launching or planning a pan-European expansion. However, at the recent Search Engine Strategies conference, none of the companies in attendance said they had plans to expand into Asia. I found this topic interesting considering how soon Yeogirl Yun's WiseNut expanded from English to Korean and Japanese. Would this company be on the same fast track to international expansion? And could they take a different path than the other shopping engines that originated in the U.S.? Although he said it was too early to talk about specific countries, Michael was able to supply the following information: (1) they would like to expand internationally as soon as they are firmly established in the U.S. (2) this expansion would include both the research side and the comparison shopping side (3) they are evaluating both Europe and Asia. Sean's Thoughts I think Become.com could be one of the most interesting combinations of opportunity, technology and philosophy since Google at Stanford... this coming from one of the biggest cheerleaders of early Google. But don't take my word for it. Try some searches. Research the shopping landscape. You might come to a different conclusion. If so, let me hear about it. For my part, I'll try to overhaul my opinions and start fresh when Become.com introduces comparison shopping. + + + see also:
Interview With Michael Yang of Become.com
Email Q&A With Michael Yang of Become.com
I recently emailed some questions to Michael Yang, the Founder, President & CEO of Become.com. We had exchanged emails before, but had not found time to talk. Not knowing when our schedules would cooperate, I went the email route to get the ball rolling, and Michael was kind enough to answer the following questions about their direction. We are planning to talk later this week, and I will try to add detail on these and other topics. If you would like to pass along any ideas before then, feel free to contact me. + + + Do you see much room for innovation on the "comparison" side, or will the bulk of the innovation come from the "crawler" side... or the integration of the two sides? Right now many of the comparison shopping engines have very similar offerings, so we definitely see the opportunity to innovate on the comparison side. Likewise, there hasn’t been a real quantum shift in web search technology since Google introduced PageRank, and that was in the late ‘90s. Become is first and foremost a technology company, and we are looking to revolutionize both these areas, as well as being in a unique position to combine them. Besides the reliance on outgoing links (in addition to incoming links), can you provide any more detail on what is different about the Affinity Index Ranking algorithm? AIR ranks web pages based on their level of interconnection with web pages on the same topic. Both inlinks and outlinks are evaluated to understand the level of interconnection among the sites. Links from valuable web pages on the same topic work to increase the score of a web page; links from off-topic sites do not help. Linking to spam pages or off-topic pages can reduce the score of the page generating the link. Advanced mathematics and concepts from Applied Physics and Engineering Dynamics are used to calculate specific scores. Do you think standalone link-based algorithms will eventually be supplemented by direct visitor feedback? Is your five-star rating system a hint in this direction? Link-based connectivity is an important aspect of evaluating web pages, and we believe that our methods of evaluating connectivity are significantly more accurate than the methods used by major search engines today. Direct visitor feedback is another indicator of the value of a web page. While direct visitor feedback may be used to supplement connectivity information, we do not believe that it will replace link-based algorithms in the near term. How many pages do you estimate Become.com would index if you did not filter non-shopping pages? We have specifically focused our crawling efforts on US-based content which is oriented toward shoppers. We do not have an accurate estimate of the number of pages indexed if we conducted a worldwide crawl of all types of content. Do you plan to extend the upcoming shopping-comparison service into other countries or languages? Yes. We plan to expand internationally after establishing our service in the US market. + + + see also:
Email Q&A With Michael Yang of Become.com
Interview with Co-Founder of WorkZoo at FyberSearchI must confess, I like to understand how a site works before posting, so as not to waste your time with sites that are not uniquely useful. Such is the case with the bumper crop of job search engines. Are they really great, or are they blowing smoke? In many cases, I have absolutely no idea. Yet. So I was excited to see a ten-question interview with Mark Maunder, CoFounder of job search engine WorkZoo.
Nice, nitty-gritty stuff, all the way down to their server specs. How can I not be curious about a site with a cool animated .gif (more info) and a non-corporate corporate weblog. If I can make enough progress on the ol' To Do list, I'd like to run an in-depth test of the job search engines. Although, if I'm lucky, another search blogger will do the in-depth testing and I can just link to them. :-)
Interview with Co-Founder of WorkZoo at FyberSearch
Interview with NexTag Co-Founder Rafael Ortiz at SES NYC
I also get the feeling that, as much as any other shopping comparison company, NexTag "gets" things like blogs and RSS. Although they have not done anything with these tools on the consumer side, their employees were among the earliest adopters of the Organized Shopping Blog. They also moved quickly before my last-minute trip to Search Engine Strategies in New York, as my press contact was able to arrange a meeting with Rafael Ortiz, Co-Founder and Vice President of Marketing, who was on the Meet The Shopping Search Engines panel. Despite only being in town for one day, battling icky weather, and having to prepare for his session later that afternoon, Rafael found time to answer some questions after lunch, even missing the first part of the Shopping Search Tactics session. Here are the highlights: + + + Q: NexTag has been expanding into a lot of new categories lately. How do you decide on which categories to enter? A: We simply look at what consumers are spending money on, and where we can add value. So if you look at a category that consumers spend money on online today, and you rank them on the total dollar spend, and then you look at whether comparison shopping engines can add value, that pretty much tells the story. So if you look at the top of the consumer discretionary spending online, you have travel products. Surprisingly, comparison shopping for travel is a relatively new category. So we look at travel, we look at financial services like people comparing rates for auto insurance. Five years from now, we won't be having this kind of conversation. It will be assumed that comparison shopping engines need to address these categories. Comparison shopping today, in some respects, is at the same point e-tail was five years ago, when people debated if Amazon should get into all these additional categories, when there were product specialists like eToys just focusing on toys. I think what the Web has really proven is, if you can add value to the process, it is relatively easy to expand into other categories, and it makes a lot of sense. Q: When I think of NexTag, I think of the price comparison features -- price graphs, price alerts, etc. Have you consciously focused more on price features, or is it something that just evolved? A: Our overall principle is to give more relevant information to shoppers to make a better decision. So when we think about buying things, what's the first thing you want to be able to do? Well, first of all, you want to be able to find the product you are interested in, so it goes without saying you want to find something easily, and you want to easily compare the different sellers and the prices of those products. The prices of those products, as we now know, don't end with the retail price. The true price ends once you understand how much you are going to pay in tax, if there is any tax, and how much you are going to pay in shipping. And it is useful to have some context in terms of what the historical price has been. We think that helps the shopper make a better informed position. There are also non-price attributes that we focus on. If you look closely at that price history chart, you'll see that we also track the popularity of the product, in terms of the number of clicks out to stores, so it gives buyers some idea of the popularity of the product that they are looking at. We think there are many price attributes we can provide to make it a more efficient process. If you think about markets that are more sophisticated than comparison shopping today -- Wall Street comes to mind -- if you think about how traders are buying commodities, they have a tremendous amount of information to help them make buying and selling decisions. It is really not that inconceivable that comparison shopping for consumers will get to that kind of evolved state. Is it there today? No. Do buyers need big trading screens showing them what the market is doing for an iPod? No, they don't. But if you just take the general premise that more relevant information at your fingertips makes you a better shopper, I think there is a lot the industry can do to improve that whole process. Price is certainly a part of it, but it does not end there. Q: How does seasonality relate to what you do as a comparison shopping engine? A: There was a time when we looked at Q4 as really the quarter, but because of the types of comparison shopping that we do today, our seasonality is not quite as dramatic as, I think, others in the category. If you look at Q1, the quarter we are in now, we actually have some categories that are at, or near, their seasonal peaks. Q1 for travel is a very large quarter, so we have a lot of people doing comparison shopping for hotels and flights. Comparison shopping for certain financial products, such as refinancing and loans, anything to help them save on their tax payments, is very big at that time. Of course, consumer product sales are at a low point now and will peak in Q4. In the second quarter and Q3, in the summer-time months, real estate comparison shopping -- finding realtors, buying homes, selling homes -- will be at its peak. So what we do is look at what functionality we need to deliver in those peak times. If you look at Q4, holiday shopping, we focus on scale, being able to bring in datafeeds from thousands of additional retailers. If you look at what we focus on in the summer-time, we will be focused on trying to connect shoppers with as many of the right real estate agents as possible. It really depends. Q: Everyone talks about traffic and how many unique visitors they had in December. What other metrics do you feel are important... i.e. number of advertisers?... A: The retailer count, I think, is a little misleading. It is generally better to say, the more retailers that you have, the better, and so I think there is a real arms race to claim that you have the most retailers. What it ignores is whether you are really helping shoppers to comparison shop for what they spend money on. If you look at consumer discretionary spending, the vast majority of people spend their money on travel products, consumer goods, houses, and autos. So, specifically, what companies in comparison shopping talk about today is, "we have ten thousand, twenty thousand, a hundred thousand, a billion retailers." But they are really only looking within a certain slice of comparison shopping, consumer goods. If you define it as all of the other categories, then you are talking about all the hotel providers, the travel agencies, banks, auto dealers, etc. You could have a ton of retailers that just sell digital cameras and sound like you have a comprehensive site. But does your comparison shopping site have thirty thousand auto dealers? Five thousand banks? All the hotel chains? So we need to be able to talk about the breadth of categories that are addressed. + + + see also:
Interview with NexTag Co-Founder Rafael Ortiz at SES NYC
Shopping Search Interviews at MarketWatchBambi Francisco might have missed the mark in the arbitrageurs.com article, but it does link to a slew of interviews with shopping search executives: Rafael Ortiz, Co-Founder of NexTag Good stuff. Free registration required.
Shopping Search Interviews at MarketWatch
Shopping Search Interview QuestionsIf anyone would like to suggest a general big-picture question about the shopping search industry, one that could apply to any/all future interviews, let me know. Also, if anyone has a burning question for a specific company, let me know, too. No guarantees, but I'll see what I can do. Thanks. p.s. - contrary to a prior post, name = optional
Shopping Search Interview Questions
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