October 17, 2003

Yahoo Inc. launched an interactive search tool in its online shopping website Thursday, which will enable consumers to quickly and easily find personalized product recommendations via an individual preference ranking technology.

The tool, SmartSort, is currently available across nine consumer electronics categories in Yahoo Shopping and will be integrated into additional categories through the end of the year, the Internet media firm said. "We have specifically designed SmartSort to assist consumers who are in the research phase of the shopping process," said Rob Solomon, vice president of Yahoo Shopping.

According to Yahoo, its SmartSort helps narrow the search for a specific product by taking a broad category like digital cameras, which has hundreds of choices, and asking a user to rank criteria (i.e. price, brand, optical zoom) according to importance. SmartSort then instantly recommends the top 10 models based on the selected criteria.

To further expedite the search, Yahoo said, all product recommendations remain on one interface and are instantly refreshed when the consumer adjusts criteria "sliders" or scales, which either place more or less value on a specific product attribute.

Yahoo said its SmartSort tool is now available in Yahoo Shopping for the categories of digital cameras, MP3 players, personal digital assistants, desktop computers, notebook computers, printers, mobile phones, televisions, and DVD players. Yahoo Shopping is the third largest multi-category commerce destination on the Web, according to an August report by Nielsen / NetRatings.

Source: China Daily

Read Serge Thibodeau's daily blogs on search engines at Serge Thibodeau Live. We strongly suggest you bookmark our web site by clicking here.

Get your business or company listed in the Global Business Listing directory and increase your business. It takes less then 24 hours to get a premium listing in the most powerful business search engine there is. Click here to find out all about it.

Rank for $ales strongly recommends the use of WordTracker to effectively identify all your right industry keywords. Accurate identification of the right keywords and key phrases used in your industry is the first basic step in any serious search engine optimization program. Click here to start your keyword and key phrase research.

You can link to the Rank for Sales web site as much as you like. Read our section on how your company can participate in our reciprocal link exchange program and increase your rankings in all the major search engines such as Google, AltaVista, Yahoo and all the others.