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.