New Shopping Search Engine

Once again John Battelle's blog has content that just screams the fact that he is an insider. Today he discussed Become.com, a month old shopping search engine still in Beta. No big deal right? Amazon isn't shaking yet but maybe the will. Because.com claims to have a shopping search engine that can out Google the best of them.

Just like John Batelle, I can't really say I understand what they are talking about, but here is what they have to say

AIR identifies exceptional web pages by understanding the level of interconnection between valuable sites from within specific fields of interest. AIR evaluates a web page based on what other “knowledgeable” sites in that specific field say about the page, and also evaluates the page based on what the page says about other “knowledgeable” sites in the specific field."

"Unlike Become.com’s AIR, Google’s PageRank estimates the popularity of a given web page by looking only at links into the page and doing so without any understanding of context. Become.com’s AIR, on the other hand, considers a site to be valuable if 1) it receives links from valuable sites within a similar topic of interest and 2) if it provides links to other valuable sites within a similar topic of interest (while minimizing links to off-topic sites)."

posted by: DigiDave