Shopping Search

What is a Shopping Search ?

A specialized type of search or dedicated search engine that indexes groups of products, prices and reviews for side-by-side comparison, especially helpful for shopping online.

A comparison shopping website, sometimes called a price comparison website, price analysis tool, comparison shopping agent, shopbot or comparison shopping engine, is a vertical search engine that shoppers use to filter and compare products based on price, features, reviews and other criteria. Most comparison shopping sites aggregate product listings from many different retailers but do not directly sell products themselves, instead earning money from affiliate marketing agreements.

Shopping search engines allow you to search specifically for products for sale from online merchants. They typically provide features different from regular search engines such as price sorting, showing product availability and merchant ratings. Unlike regular search engines, most shopping search engines charge merchants to be included in their listings. If merchants don’t pay, they don’t appear — and searchers might miss out on finding the right bargains.

Google runs Google Shopping, which allows for dedicated product search, and it also surfaces some product search results within regular Google searches. Google Shopping shifted to an all-advertising format in 2012, reversing a strong stance Google had previously taken against that practice.

Google’s chief rival Bing killed its own Bing Shopping service in August 2013, but shopping ads and product listings with “rich captions” may appear in regular Bing results.

Other shopping search engines to consider include Become, Nextag, PriceGrabber, Pronto, Shopping.com, Shopzilla and The Find.