Consumer behavior at product search engines

What do consumers want at shopping engines?
The consumer wants to find what they are looking for with a minimal amount of effort. The consumer does not want to use Google as a book marking tool, which is what it effectively is at the end of day. There are different types of consumer shopping patterns.

Product search engines cater to consumer shopping patterns.
There are many different kinds of consumers. Some want search engine to find a red pair of shoes, or a part number, or drill down into a product category via taxonomy tree or using a classification engine.

Consumers have different shopping methods.

1. Some consumers need a solution: a certain auto part or an appliance that is a certain size.
   
2. Some consumers want to select several products from the same category and priority sort the products by attribute. Sorting by attribute requires that the product data records in the search engine be normalized and that a comparison feature be enabled.
   
3. Other consumers want to know if their peers think that a product has the cool factor. This requires that groups of the same type of people are able exchange information about a product.
   
4. Or is the product functional or reliable. Consumer reports is one source for reliability information. End users are another.
5. Some consumers want a recommendation from owners of the product.
6. Amazon has a voting system which purchasers of products use to rate a product after they have used it.
7. Drill down through taxonomy trees is another method.