Saw the news on Google reworking its shopping search site and decided to check it out. For a while now, I’ve been using thefind and like it – way better than all the comparison shopping sites both in terms of usability and quality of results. While Google’s Product Search is an improvement on Froogle, I think I’m going to stick with thefind for now. Here are some of my issues:
- All the criteria that can be used to narrow search results are at the bottom of the page while valuable real estate in the right sidebar is occupied by ads. I guess Google decided to sacrifice usability for revenue (makes sense, Wall Street now drives this ship) …
- The lists of brands, stores, etc that can be used to narrow searches seem to have quite a few errors – for example, Packard Bell was listed as a brand for “sheet sets” – when I clicked on the brand, I was shown sheet sets from Pottery Barn – wondering if the matching initials had something to do with this … I spotted a few more errors in a similar vein, leading me to believe there is some cleanup needed behind the scenes …
- I really like thefind‘s interface better – visual information (which is really important for shopping IMO) dominates over textual information and screen real estate is used more effectively overall.
Full Disclosure: I am good friends with Nanda Kishore – ex-CEO of thefind and we have collaborated on other projects.
