give me back my google

Have you noticed that your searches on google, particularly for consumer goods (like electronics), are often cluttered and/or dominated by price comparison engine sites? I have to admit that this is not an issue for most kiwi googlers. Price comparison engines are not a huge factor here in New Zealand (although I am willing to make a bet that they will be in the future).

If you shift your focus to buying retail consumer products using google in the United States, the issue of cluttered search results is all of a sudden far more apparent. The thing is that sometimes you don't want to see search results that are dominated by price comparison engines such as Kelkoo, Pricerunner or Bizrate.

The answer for you in this situatiion is GiveMeBackMyGoogle. This is a great little site that was recommended to me by a friend recently. I have to say I love the concept of this search engine.

Unfortunately for the developer of this new tool, it is highly unlikely that he will be able to build a successful business strategy around this product. For one, it is still based on google's core search technology (he/she has just used a syntax to display search results minus a huge number of price comparison sites). And secondly, it is likely that Google will launch a feature to address the issue of cluttered results in the near future anyway. My post about Googles new mashed up search talks about this as does my post about Google testing Category grouped search results.

But still, I like this new tool.

For the kiwis out there who are interested in doing a bit of price comparison shopping online in New Zealand, why not try Pricespy. It has always amazed me that Pricespy has not grown to be a more significant force in our local e-commerce space. So much potential, yet the site seems to have been quite stagnant for some years now since it won best small business website in the 2003 Netguide web awards. They seem to still be running a adsense based revenue model?

Some also may argue that trademe is the kiwi answer to price comparison online. Maybe trademe will look into features that head more down this track in the future. New product reviews would need to be included, however, this does shouldn't be too much of an issue for trademe to implement.

What do you guys think about price comparison engines for the New Zealand Market?

Comments

[Jon Beattie]

This isn't really a business, just a form that links to Google. I'm surprised that they didn't do it with Google CSE would have allowed them to actually get revenue share on the AdWords:

http://www.jonbeattie.com/google-custom-search-engine/

Google's totally cool with the concept of custom search and opens up a lot of possibilities. If niche search is really a long term viable model is yet to be proven though, but if you're going to do it, using Google's infrastructure is definitely the answer.