Has anything changed in the shopping search engines in the last 8 years?

8 years ago there was a rush to build shopping search engines, which were funded, built and sold to big corporations. These engines built custom scrapers and data feed aggregators. The data was not de-duped/normalized. Today we still have the same set of problems when searching for data.: not normalized, no rich attributes for most product categories, can't find all products at all stores, can't find the best price, don't know which is the best merchant to buy a particular product from, ...

difficult to find relevant information on the web, quickly.

Om Malik:
In our modern, highly networked lives it is getting increasingly difficult to find relevant information on the web, quickly. The 10 blue links paradigm, popularized by Google, appears to be reaching its limits. While this seek-search-and-consume methodology has become part of our basic Internet behavior and turned Google into a gazillion-dollar company, it may be time for us to look for alternatives.

The long tail in search results

"When developing search engine technology, Microsoft focused on returning good results for popular queries but ignored the minor ones. 'It turned out the long tail was much more important,' said Bing's Yusuf Mehdi. 'One-third of queries that show up on Bing, it's the first time we've ever seen that query.' Yet the long tail is what makes most of Google's money. Microsoft is so far behind now that they won't crush Google, but they hope to live side by side, with Bing specializing in transactions like plane tickets, said Bing Director Stefan Weitz."

CEO of Radar Networks on e-commerce and structured data

“First and foremost is e-commerce, an area that is ripe with structured data that needs to be normalized, integrated and made more searchable. This is perhaps the most potentially profitable and immediately useful application of semantic technologies. It’s also one where there has been very little innovation.”
Nova Spivack CEO Twine

Finding what you want

How many times do you know what you want but can't find it easily online? People look for items online by specification (e.g. a microwave that mounts under the cabinet and is a certain dimension. You want to find a replacement part or you are looking for a particular item. You know the model number. You know the manufacturer but it takes a really long time to find it via Google. The information is available online at various web sites but it is not aggregated at a single site. This makes finding the products you are looking for difficult. There has to be a better way to find what you want. Search tools should provide a search by attribute, drill down by classification, and comprehensive results. You should not have to become the search engine, piecing together information from many different sources.

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.
   

The conversion of paper catalogs to web pages

Auto trader is an example of a company that thrived by offering the consumer an organized source of cars for sale in a particular geographical area. New Autotrader publications were released periodically.

If you were looking for a car in the 80's you might have gone to the local street corner and picked up a copy of the local classified ad weekly and turned to the auto section.

Apartment rentals are another example of a news paper information source being usurped by the web.

Craigslist changed the communication medium for the regular newspapers and free classified ad hand outs.

Autotrader migrated to the web. But competitors soon appeared to challenge their dominant position in the auto ad business. Companies such as vast.com and craigslist captured market share in the auto ad business.

Craiglist is a database that is maintained by its members.

Vast.com aggregates information from online sources.