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.
Great plug for theFind! Judging from the rate of growth of organic visits there are more people who feel the same way you do.