New Yahoo! Shopping Search & Tab

Following yesterday's Shopping.com relaunch, Yahoo! has today relaunched their shopping search. It is available both at shopping.yahoo.com and as a new tab from regular Yahoo! searches. The new tab has a "Products" label and is on the far right just after the News tab. Like Shopping.com, results include product information, user reviews, and a price comparison feature. Yahoo! shopping even has an alert feature, to send email alerts when prices change.

Yahoo! has fewer narrowing and sorting options, but its underlying database draws primarily upon the Yahoo! stores (plus outside merchants who pay to supply product feeds to Yahoo!). This is a different collection of merchants than Shopping.com. Sometimes Yahoo! has more stores listed, and sometimes Shopping.com has more. So who has more and who has the best price. On a quick search comparison for two digital cameras, it varied. For the Olympus C-5050, Shopping.com had 68 stores compared to Yahoo!'s 75. Yahoo!'s search had the best price by $1.05. For the Olympus D-390, Yahoo! had only 34 stores to Shopping.com's 42. This time, Shopping.com had the better price by $14. None of these price comparisons include shipping or other extra charges.

And how do both compare to Google's Froogle? Froogle finds many more hits, but they are not all necessarily hits from the actual product. For these cameras, they are often for accessories such as batteries or memory cards. And in both cases, the least expensive actual camera that Froogle found was more expensive, than the cheapest at both Yahoo! Shopping and Shopping.com.

Read more about the Yahoo! changes in the press release.