Become Officially Launches

Search engine Become.com ( http://www.become.com ) has launched its official shopping index. Because it seems to be focused on product reviews (as opposed to buying stuff), because it doesn't require registration, and because it's so huge (3+ billion pages), I'm covering it. But please don't take this as my stated intention to cover lots and lots of stores. Okay? Thank you.

Now. Become.com has a standard query box, along with a list of recently- researched search results. Run a search. I'm going to run a search for an iPod FM transmitter:

ipod "fm transmitter"

I get over 449,000 results, which appear from the front page to be mostly reviews, with a title, snippet, URL, and an extra link to open the page in a new window. There's also a link to a cached version of the page. The cache page doesn't appear to be dated.

There is a little bit of special syntax; you can limit search results to a particular site. But I'd like to see this site go a little further.

Say I was looking for video game reviews. I may find that I am very much "in sync" with the reviews from Site A, but the reviews from Site B leave me cold, and the reviews from Site C make me furious. I could of course restrict all my review searches to Site A, but then I'll miss reviews from new sources, or sources I consider neutral.

It would be nice if there were a way -- and I didn't see it in the help file -- to indicate that you find sites less trustworthy and want them to be excluded. I suppose you could use a series of site: syntax additions to the query to get rid of the sites you want, but that's awkward.

I know it's probably asking too much, but I'd also like to see some kind of source list -- at least for the major sources. Where is this stuff coming from? How international is it? How much of it is blog-based? I want to have a better sense on whose opinions I'm consulting when I'm searching the site.

On the other hand, I generally liked the caliber of the results; the results were very focused on reviews and there wasn't a lot of junk in what I was getting. But I would like a few more tools for precision in my search.

Posted to Business-Consumer | TrackBack