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OT for Dr. Myke - How to Find Those Gifts in a Flash

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/18/business/18money.html?_r=1&oref=login

By DAMON DARLIN
Published: November 18, 2006
You would not think of driving into an unfamiliar neighborhood without first downloading directions from the Internet or programming the G.P.S. receiver.

You would not dream of setting up meetings or lunch dates without e-mail, instant messaging or text messaging.

Then you should not even consider compiling a holiday gift list without using some of the indispensable tools of the modern shopper: the latest Internet shopping sites and a cellphone.

The market analysts at Jupiter say that 75 percent of shoppers already begin their endeavors online. But if shoppers blithely start with an old-school shopping comparison site like Google’s Froogle they often find themselves staring at a dog’s breakfast of undifferentiated and unsorted data. Typing in “T.M.X. Elmo,” the hard-to-find dancing doll, yields no fewer than 1,075 listings (in 0.11 seconds, Google tells us helpfully).

Don’t even think of putting in a general term like jeans or soccer shoes. But enough chit-chat. Let’s grab our shopping lists and a few computer scientists and get started. We are looking for a new video game machine, the new Elmo, jeans and maybe some shoes.

A good place to start is TheFind.com. The site pops up on the screen with a search box and a simple question: What can we find for you? Start typing and it finishes your query.

The company in Mountain View, Calif., that developed this search engine says that its software crawls over 500,000 online stores to locate 150 million products. But is also uses some proprietary algorithms to rank and order the searches so they present the results that are more likely relevant. It located an obscure Disney video, “Dr. Syn,” also known as “The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh,” (hint) with as much ease as it found a Cuisinart ICE-50BC ice cream maker (hint hint).

Still, TheFind remains the technological version of traipsing through every store in every mall in the country. That is one way to shop, but the usefulness of this method is limited by how much information about the product is on display. The Web crawling search engines cannot find the best deals if the online merchants do not post prices or if they game their site so crawlers pick up discounted prices that are not actually offered.

Likewise, crawlers usually cannot discover product availability. Just locating a store with a Nintendo Wii or Sony PlayStation 3 game machine is the main challenge. Chris Lambert, a computer science major at Northeastern University, has created a clever program that pulls the store inventory data off Target.com to help people find the new Nintendo Wii that goes on sale Sunday.

His site at http://wii.clambert.org is similar to one he created last year to find the then hot machine, Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Mr. Lambert, a college senior, was scraping data off Best Buy’s sites and the company’s lawyers sent him a cease and desist letter. He ceased even though he received e-mails from 1,200 people who said it helped them find systems — at Best Buy. “It was unfortunate because it was really boosting their launch-day traffic,” he said.

Others have used similar technology to locate the new Sony PS3, like PS3seeker.com. It would not be hard for someone to compile data from merchants’ sites for our Elmo, but we couldn’t find such a site. “They aren’t a lot of work to create and they have a lot of utility,” said Mr. Lambert, who has accepted a job from Google.

A pit stop at Mpire.com offered great promise. Along with listings from stores, it will search Craigslist entries, by city, for any product you want. But the search engine is temperamental. Inconceivably, it could not find a single T.M.X. Elmo in Los Angeles, but when just the word Elmo was entered, dozens of them popped up, alas, usually selling for almost three times the original retail price.

Still looking for that Elmo doll, we tried ShopLocal.com, which promises to find local merchants selling a particular product, but the results are too often confused. The local merchants it found included the MDE Electric Company, an electrical supply company. Why? Probably because it is at 135 St. Elmo Way in San Francisco. The site does better locating local newspaper ads and store circulars.

Yokel.com did a better job. Type in a ZIP code as well as the product you are seeking and this site locates the nearby stores selling it. It usually comes up with the price at the store too.

While in one of those stores, it is inevitable you’ll see something you want. How will you know if you can get it cheaper elsewhere? Whip out your cellphone and dial 888-363-7822. That connects to Frucall.com. Punch in the Universal Product Code number that appears beneath the barcode and it will locate lower prices. The service is free. CNET, which runs shopper.com, offers a similar comparison service, called m.cnet.com, that works through a cellphone’s text messaging.

Back home, Wii-less and Elmo-less, old-fashioned eBay auctions look more attractive. Bidnearby.com and Mapcreature.com display data from eBay auctions on a Google map so you can locate people near your home selling things you want. It will save you money on shipping, especially when buying bulky items.

Another way to shop is to confine your search to just the stores selling what you want. Zappos.com, for instance, devotes itself just to shoes. But it is not a search engine. Extensive as Zappos is, and it boasts of 3.28 million different shoes, it cannot find any pumps or penny loafers anywhere but on its own site.

Zafu.com has an innovation that narrows the search for a pair of women’s jeans while broadening the pool of targets. Zafu created a search engine that located one thing, the perfect-fitting woman’s jeans, before it bothered to find the best price. “The Internet brought massive reach — you can see everything,” said Rob Holloway, the site’s chief executive. “But the problem with seeing everything is that you see nothing.”

Zafu asks about how jeans gap at the waist and about what parts of the anatomy you want to emphasize or de-emphasize. It knows how the denim’s fading or the stitching makes the thighs look slimmer because Mr. Holloway runs a consulting company that advises retailers how to make clothes fit better. It asks fewer than a dozen questions and never asks for a measurement to find the perfect jeans. “Most women don’t want to take the SATs to get a pair of jeans,” he said.

The search engine technology could be used to find jewelry, eyeglasses or even home furnishings, Mr. Holloway said. But Zafu will stick to clothing as it expands to other hard-to-fit items for both sexes.

If you aren’t exhausted from all the shopping yet, here are a few other sites that could save you some time and money this holiday season. By the way, the biggest online shopping day is not the Monday after Thanksgiving, so-called CyberMonday. That is a gimmick made up by online merchants’ public relations hirelings. Last year, 20 percent of all holiday shopping was done two weeks later, on Monday, Dec. 12, according to an online commerce trade group, Shop.org.

Ugenie.com: Can you get a better deal by buying more than one item from an online store? This site’s value-added feature is a search engine that locates bundles of products that cost less together than separately. So far, it concentrates on movies, music, books and games.

Wize.com: The bell and whistle welded onto this site is a product rating system that purports to synthesize hundreds of product reviews from experts and regular consumers. It is not clear how useful that is because the site compares apples to oranges. Expensive single lens reflex cameras, for instance, get Wize ratings in the 90s, while the compact cameras popular with the average consumers rate in the 70s.

Sprenzy.com: This site garners a lot of buzz because it taps into the mood of Silicon Valley. It is a shopping comparison site that is also a blog. It would be really hot if it mixed in some MySpace-style social networking.

Kaboodle.com: Too late. This site finds that social aspect. It inserts a little button in the tool bar of your browser, so every time you see a product you want on a Web site, you click it. Then you can find out about the product and share the results of your search with others. Why? For the same reason you share pictures taken in the mirror on MySpace.

EarlyMiser.com: Great name, but it doesn’t do much more than what other older sites do.

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