Brilliant Shopper worth a look
We know there's too many shopping search engines out there, but here's one reason why Brilliant Shopper, which has just launched, is worth a look: Like recently launched competitor Become.com (see here), Brilliant Shopper has the advantage of starting afresh at a time when more advanced shopping search engines have cut relationships with vendors that force them to compromise their standards on providing objective search results. Just as Google overtook Yahoo, Excite and others on plain search, the story on shopping might be similar here. Though we've tried a few searches on Brilliant, and they seemed to work well, we'd be interested in what others think. This is a Silicon Valley (Fremont) company, started by some ex-Ask Jeeves and other folk.
Saw this one a while ago and don't get it; looks like it's just a Shopping.com cobrand with Findwhat contextual ads. What am I missing?
Greg Yardley on April 22, 2005 1:40 PMComment link
Who are the people behind this? I'm nervous about a company that doesn't list their exec team on their "about us" section of the website.
Bartely on April 22, 2005 5:20 PMComment link
Greg, thanks for pointing out the cobrand with Shopping.com. Indeed, there's an icon at the bottom of the organic results showing that the results, or at least some of them, originate from Shopping.com. That makes Brilliant Shopper less interesting. The other stuff would have to be pretty good to compensate.
Bartely, we're told founder and CEO Phillip Lan hails from Ask Jeeves, where he worked on syndications, explaining the partnership model the company is apparently pursuing. The company's "about us" page also lists "high tech veterans" from IBM, Disney and KLA-Tencor.
Meanwhile, we'll try to find out a little more on both of these questions.
Matt Marshall on April 22, 2005 7:47 PMComment link
Tried it out, and the results weren't very good. No way to sort by price? Even froogle has that. Doesn't work at all with Netscape (sigh). Very uninteresting results for Miller TIG welders. Guess its back to froogle & pricegrabber for me.
Derek on April 24, 2005 12:22 AMComment link
