Search engine users can identify their needs more closely with new engine, company claims

• After four days of all search, all the time at Search Engine Strategies (SES) last week, I thought I was up to speed with search's bleeding edge.
• Until my meeting this week with the newest entrant in the shopping search fray: Become.com.
• Cofounders Michael Yang and Yeogirl Yun, the team that built comparison-shopping site mySimon (which they sold for $700 million), dropped in for a chat.
• A BIGresearch study went further still, finding close to 75 percent of all consumers research online before buying offline.
• As Yang put it, "There's no context of user interest."
• As search becomes the fastest-growing sector of the burgeoning interactive marketing industry, spawning billions of dollars' worth of new advertising and business models, there's been no good way of knowing if a term such as "digital camera" means the searcher is researching a purchase, looking to buy a camera, or chasing down information about using a camera he already owns.
• On Google, Yahoo!, and their ilk, page rank hinges on inbound link popularity.
• The Consumer Reports Web site just isn't linked much, but it is chock-full of buying advice.
• Yun, cofounder and CTO, explained Become's algorithm considers outbound as well as inbound links in ranking results and penalizes sites with in- or outbound links to off-topic content or spam.
• The company plans to add feeds midyear, shooting for 2,000 affiliate and merchant/vendor feeds by year end.
• Shopping.com, in comparison, has just over 3,500 feeds.
• Here's the part where you marketers out there feel like kids staring yearningly into a candy store.
• Despite Become's unprecedented segmentation of searchers known to be shopping into research and shop modes, Yang told me the company has no plans to sell ads.