June 28, 2005

Classifieds / Job Search at VerticalLeap

Classifieds / Job Search

At Vertical Leap Vertical Search Event

Tag:

Here are my raw notes. Further processing to come later.

Moderator: John Zappe, Classified Intelligence Report

Panelists:

continue reading the Classifieds / Job Search at VerticalLeap

Posted by barney on June 28, 2005 at 2:43 pm | No Comments

June 28, 2005

Shopping Search panel at VerticalLeap

Shopping Search
At Vertical Leap Vertical Search Event
Tag:
Here are my raw notes. Further processing to come later.
Moderator: Gary Stein, Jupiter Research
panelists:
(Mark Bradley, NexTag – absent)
Graham Jones, PriceGrabber
Chris Salto, Yahoo Shopping
Michael Yang, Become.com
o Michael
Founded MySimon in 1998, price comparison shopping on internet.
Raised VC funding and grow traffic. In 2000, was acquired by CNET.
1.5 years ago, got together with partner Yeogirl.
Chose shopping as felt there was more that could be done with the
unstructured and structured content.
Launched become.com algorithmic search for shopping 2 months ago. Getting a
lot of traction. Launching comparison shopping in 2 weeks.
o Graham
PriceGrabber been around since March 1999. Started in computers vertical,
moed to electronics, photography, software, then across the soft channel
markets. Added travel and autos most recently. Saw we could employ the same
tech across multiple channels. SKU association: match products based on
manufacturer name and product information. We brought it down to single page
per product, with multiple vendors.
We just announced we’ll work with MSN to provide them with more offers to
their search results. Should roll out beta soon.
Gary: Interesting how you started with one category and grew and grew.
o Chris Saito, runs product management group at Yahoo Shopping. It’s one of
60M products from 250,000 merchants. Build our database through structured
data from merchants, and we crawl also to get breadth and comprehensiveness.
Recently we launched free listings for auctions, integrated tightly into
shopping. Also focus on integrating Yahoo Shopping throughout the
network. Travel services, auto marketplace, and main search.
q: Gary: Consumer benefit is ability to find the breadth of products. When we
first heard about mysimon, there was concern it was the death of the brand
and would wreck business. What’s the real story, looking back?
Chris: we’ve learned that people don’t just shop on price. Merchant and
brand are very important. We created a community to let people rate
merchants. When user has recognized them, that’s a key part.
Graham: There are a ton of merchants that aren’t even participating in
comparison shopping. They feel they can’t compete on price. Examples: bed,
bath and beyond; lowes; pier one. If they were aware the customer
acquisition cost from our services they would pay in a second. It’s not just
comparison shopping. If you go to Google or Overture, they’re buying just
their name as they keyword, but not even buying “bed” or “bath” (and
certainly not “beyond” :) . Pricegrabber had 12 million people use our site
in December 2003, 18 million in 2004. Consumers are deciding they want to
comparison shop.
Michael: People are looking for info about products, like reviews and buying
guides and articles. People use general search engines to do research for
products. But using engines like Google you get a lot of junk results, based
on manipulation. E.g. I was shopping for LCD Projector, trying to research,
and kept getting merchants trying to sell me something. Not just price but
the quality of product, what other users have to say about. So we developed
algorithmic search engine that is focused on gathering also all the
non-shopping information.
o Gary: On paper the benefits of comparison shopping are very clear, but
people are still going to Yahoo etc. What are the shopping engines doing to
bring traffic directly to their sites. They are enormous buyers in
keywords. Are users shifting to go their directly?
Graham: We syndicate our site, cobrand it. Eg. on PC World they have a
finder. Similar with Ask Jeeves, Comcast, About.com. Shoppers are embracing
comparison shopping but we’re giving the content to the publishers so they
can monetize their traffic. For PriceGrabber more people are using our
service. And for publisher and advertiser this gives more ways to reach an
audience interested in this content.
We’re bringing people back to the publisher.

continue reading the Shopping Search panel at VerticalLeap

Posted by barney on June 28, 2005 at 1:53 pm | No Comments

June 28, 2005

Investing in Vertical Search: Panel at Vertical Leap

Investing in Vertical Search
At Vertical Leap Vertical Search Event
Tag:
Here are my raw notes. Further processing to come later.
o Mark Kvamme, Sequoia Capital
“Search has been good to us”
Experience has to be better, consumers have to see it instantly
Kayak: better experience. And deal with AOL for distribution.
Google, though very good, got their big uptick with Yahoo distribution.
So need not just very good product but also distribution.
If you have distribution, you have clicks, the advertisers will find you
because they know it’s a very important market.
o Chris Moore, Redpoint Ventures (backed Ask Jeeves, MySimon)
Redpoint invested in Fatlens, Oodle
Google, Yahoo, Jeeves are good at navigational quries (you know the site or
piece of info you’re looking for, helps you get there).
The next set of opportunities will address class of queries more complex and
fine grained than the basic search engines are providing today.
Lot of room for improvement in the search experience because of these fine
grained and complex queries.
The bad news is many of these are niche oriented. And unlike the first time
around, when Yahoo gave Google distribution, all the big guys are paying
attention to filling out the user experience, and acquiring the niche
engines that are filling the need. But the challenge is to find some of thes
that do hae the potential to be really large.
Oodle: search engine for classifieds. Aggregating al the listings across the
web. Ex Excite guys. Lots of sources, not that easy.
Fatlens: search paradigm for comparison shopping category. Focusing on
categories where the ihherent listings are unstructured, to normalize them
into a complelling user experience. Started in tickets, but you’ll see them
roll out across other categories.

continue reading the Investing in Vertical Search: Panel at Vertical Leap

Posted by barney on June 28, 2005 at 11:39 am | No Comments

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