BECOME.COM... MYSIMON FOUNDERS LAUNCH A NEW SHOPPING SEARCH ENGINE

Michael Yang and Yeogirl Yun are at it again with a new shopping search engine, Become.com:

Become.com is a site that aggregates or scrapes a number of shopping-related Web sites to give online shoppers a more focused experience they wouldn't necessarily get by searching on Google , Yahoo , Ask Jeeves or other general-purpose search engines. (Ask Jeeves executives will be presenting on Wednesday at the Goldman Sachs technology conference.)

Much like comparison-shopping sites, such as Google's Froogle, CNet's MySimon and Shopping.com, Become.com generates listings of online retailers that sell certain items related to a query.

But Become.com also expands it searches to include articles related to a search query.
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Yun says that Become.com's search crawler is based on a new technology called AIR, or Affinity Index Ranking. "It's a next-generation-hypertext-link-analysis algorithm," Yun said. "The 'old' technology that is used by Google, and many other search engines, like Yahoo and MSN, is called PageRank." PageRank was named after Google co-founder Larry Page. Unlike PageRank, which considers incoming links, AIR, considers incoming and outgoing links, Yun explained. (full article)

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Become.com is one of the first search engines we’ve seen with a laser-like focus on (1) helping people comparison shop, while at the same time (2) using a clean search engine algorithm – free of paid placements, etc – to help people research products. In other words, Become.com is turning the tables on Google -- by doing what Google does for general search, but doing it only for shopping. And notably, it’s removing some of the “crud” that has crept into Google’s search results over the past year or two.

For now, Become is a search engine that's best suited for researching product reviews. But the site will eventually evolve into a full-fledged comparison shopping site, pulling in product feeds from vendors in much the same way as Shopping.com or other shopping sites.