Become Shopping Search PreLaunch

When I talked about Michael Yang’s new search engine I didn’t give much detail as to what it would do, how it was put together, what made it unique and so forth.

Read Jason’s inital Become article.

Well here’s a sneak peek under the hood brought to you exclusively by Marketing Shift featuring a question and answer session between me and Michael about Become.

1. What is the scope of the Become crawler? Is it limited to retail web sites, wholesalers, CNet, eBay, etc…?

Michael: Our crawler crawls the entire web but only indexes sites and pages that our intelligent crawler deem shopping related. We have proprietary technologies built in to recognize whether a page is a merchant order page, review page, manufacturers, forums, etc.

2. What is the foundation of your ranking algorithm? Google has PageRank and it’s based heavily on backlinks but it’s been faulted for the shortcomings of such an algo. Is there a secret sauce for Become’s algo?

Michael: Yes, we have a new ranking agorithm with proprietary technologies that we believe is the next generation. We overcome many of the short comings of pagerank algorithm.

3. How many unique pages will be included in Become’s index when it goes live?

Michael: 2.2 billion pages.

4. Is there any way to guarantee Become crawls a particular web site?

Michael: Yes. [more information on getting included in Become’s search results to follow in a later Q & A session with Michael.]

5. I assume there will be a ppc element to the site since you mentioned that when we first spoke in March at SES. Is this the case and if so, where can site owners, marketing firms, ad agencies, etc… go to get more information on that or to set up an account? Is therea way to set up a ppc account prior to the go live date?

Michael: We are partnering with Google Adsense for our PPC program. [More information regarding the partnership with Google to follow in a later Q & A session with Michael.]

It will be interesting to see how things go with Become as it nears launch. There is an invite-only prelaunch party scheduled for February 10th in Palo Alto. I’ll be blogging the event and the days leading up to it as well so stay tuned.

Jason Dowdell is a technology entrepreneur and operates the Marketing Shift blog.