Brilliant Shopper, a multi-faceted “shopping engine,” is launching this week with the goal of unifying the often fragmented process of researching and buying products online.
Founded by veterans of Ask Jeeves, Disney and IBM, Brilliant Shopper is one of the “next generation” shopping search services that have been springing up this year. These services are attempting to go beyond traditional approaches to shopping search by plugging gaps and addressing unmet needs that frustrate users.
The first generation of shopping search engines relied largely on structured product feeds provided by merchants. In many cases, merchants also pay a premium for placement in shopping search results.
As shopping search has evolved, web crawling technology is increasingly being used to supplement feeds, with the benefit of expanding the number of products and merchants available as well as offering additional types of information relevant to the shopping experience, such as reviews, ratings, coupons and so on.