The comparison shopping market just got more competitive. Yahoo Inc. has revamped its search function to include Yahoo Shopping results and provide consumers with the ability to comparison shop online.
Yahoo today reported that it is combining a new Yahoo Product Search function with Yahoo Shopping so that consumers searching for products will get results from both services. Product Search will search the web for products and allow retailers to pay for guaranteed inclusion in results; Yahoo Shopping’s traditional search function searched just the merchants listed with Yahoo Shopping.
“With the integration of Yahoo Product Search, Yahoo Shopping has been expanded from a semi-exclusive shopping site into a more comprehensive, open platform where consumers will be able to access results from across the web and find products from almost any merchant online,” Yahoo says.
Yahoo will charge merchants on a cost-per-click basis for inclusion in:
-- Yahoo Product Search: Paid inclusion by which listings are included within the index of products searched but does not guarantee where the results will rank nor does it enable merchants to influence their rankings. Yahoo says its Product Search results are determined by how relevant they are to the search query.
-- Yahoo Shopping Buyer's Guides, where paid inclusion provides merchants with logo placement, bolded text, and text links.
Yahoo says its new Product Search uses algorithmic search technology to extract results from multiple sources, including Yahoo's database of more than 17,000 merchants and millions of products that are part of the Yahoo Shopping platform, a new database of merchants and products that have established direct feeds into Yahoo Product Search through Yahoo's new Product Submit program, and merchants and products identified through advanced crawling capabilities.
Yahoo says its shopping section has been redesigned with a focus on creating a comprehensive comparison-shopping destination. New features include:
-- Side-by-side price and feature comparison allowing consumers to compare up to 10 products at one time
-- Consumer reviews: Users can rate merchants or products using a multi-dimensional feedback system.
-- Buyer's guides: Detailed information on pricing, calculated shipping and tax costs, product specifications, expert and user reviews and merchant information, all on one page.
"The combination of Yahoo Shopping and Yahoo Search is a major milestone in our vertical search strategy, as we focus on seamlessly integrating value-added vertical content categories into Yahoo's web search to ultimately deliver the highest quality search experience on the Internet," said Jeff Weiner, senior vice president Yahoo Search and Marketplace. "With our new shopping site, Yahoo has harnessed the potential of world-class algorithmic search and powerful web crawling technology and combined it with rich product and merchant information to create an unparalleled product search and comparison shopping experience for our users."
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