Copyright 1999 by Richard Seltzer. All rights are reserved.
The following article is based on the introduction from Shop Online the Lazy Way, a book written by Richard Seltzer, which was published in August 1999 by Macmillan. It is available in paperback directly from our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat or from Amazon.com. It is also available in a Braille edition from National Braille Press (www.nbp.org).
Now that the rights have reverted to the author, he is free to update and revise this online version. Please send email to alert him of changes and interesting new sites that you have encountered.
You can save time, hassle, and money by shopping for brand-name consumer products at the brand-name online stores prominently positioned on Internet portal sites. It's only natural that that's how you begin your online shopping experience.
Since the online world is new and strange, you are most likely to turn to the names that you trust. Confidence in dealing with other stores will come from isolated experiences--chance encounters, recommendations, and from interacting with other online shoppers.
Eventually, your curiosity will grow, and you'll crave more exotic shopping experiences. You will sense that you have just barely touched the surface and wonder: What's really out there? How do you find truly unique items? How do you find the amazing bargains? Where is the revolutionary experience?
In this chapter, we'll introduce you to some basic tools that can help you take advantage of the unexpected opportunities lurking in the chaotic immensity of the Internet--search engines, comparison shopping sites, and the places where ordinary people like us can both buy and sell from one another without stores--classified ads, newsgroups, and auctions.
Directories and search engines--when to use what
At the large Web sites that call themselves "portals," you will probably have a choice of searching or browsing through the content of their site and/or of the Web at large. You search when you know exactly or fairly close to what you want. You enter the appropriate word or words in the syntax required by that search engine and ideally you go to a hyperlinked list of pages that probably contain the information you want. If you don't find what you want on the first try, that's either because the information isn't available, or because you need to improve your "query"--that is make your search terms more precise and make sure you are using proper syntax. Syntax is the structure for the query that this particular search engine requires, for instance the use of punctuation. (There are no standards. They all do it their own way.)
When you are uncertain--maybe you know the category, but are looking for suggestions or ideas, you should browse or surf through directory listings. In this case you look at organized lists of choices, perhaps with descriptions attached and probably with hyperlinks to more detailed choices. This is like walking into a book or music store, going to you favorite section, and scanning the shelves to see what's new and what might catch your interest.
Most people favor one style more than the other--it's a matter of personality. Beginners strongly favor directories, because they feel familiar--like yellow pages listings. Sometimes you think in categories and sometimes in specifics. If I want to find a college in Southern California, I'll go through a directory, checking under colleges, then US, then California, then Southern California, scan the list and pick the ones I want to check out. If I want to find driver software for my BJ200 Canon printer so I can run it with the new operating system I just installed on my computer, I'll use a search engine and go straight to the Web page I want. Everybody will probably use both these modes of operation at one time or another.
With a directory, you depend on the judgement and hard work of others to sort out what information is important and how pieces of information relate to one another. Using such a service exclusively would be like having someone else arrange your house, categorize your email into folders, arrange your books, organize your CD collection or your videotapes. Most people prefer to define "order" based on how their own mind works and makes associations, rather than on the tastes of someone else. At first someone else's order might seem convenient, but as you become more familiar with the Internet and what's really possible, these structures begin to get in your way.
With a search engine, if you go through the trouble of learning the commands, you can pluck whatever you want from the massive disorder of the Internet whenever you want, and quickly. And you aren't limited by the decisions of others. The search engines send out robots on expeditions of exploration and discovery, so you don't have to. But they don't make judgements of relevance or worth--that's your role; and that way the one item that is most important to you doesn't get filtered out before you learn that it exists.
Playing the Portal Game
There are fewer search engines and directories than you probably thought. The major players keep buying up related and competing services, and they also use one another's services.
Excite, a search engine which was bought by the Internet cable service @Home, owns Webcrawler (search engine) and Magellan (directory) and Classifieds2000 (massive classified ad site). Lycos (search engine) owns HotBot (search engine) and Tripod (massive Web-hosting site).
AOL Netfind uses Excite in the US and Lycos in Europe. Netscape Search uses Excite. LookSmart (directory) uses AltaVista (search engine) for the search part of its service, and AltaVista and HotBot use LookSmart for the directory part of their service. Magellan (directory) uses Webcrawler (search engine). Search.com uses InfoSeek (search engine). InfoSeek partnered with Disney to create the GO Network www.go.com, which includes ESPN.com, Disney.com, ABCnews.com, ABC.com, and Mr. ShowBiz. Inktomi (search engine) powers HotBot, NBC's Snap, Yahoo, and iAtlas. And Microsoft's MSN just announced that it is switching from Inktomi to AltaVista for search. By the time you read this paragraph, these relationships and many others will most certainly have changed yet again.
Despite appearances, you really only have a choice of about nine major search engines (AltaVista, Inktomi, Northern Light, Excite, InfoSeek, Lycos, Webcrawler and newcomers Google and AlltheWeb).
How big are these search engines? WebCrawler covers about 2 million Web page documents, which by physical standards sounds immense, but by Internet standards is tiny. AltaVista weighs in a 140 million, while Inktomi has 110 million, Northern Light 80 million, Excite 55 million, InfoSeek 30 million, and Lycos 30 million. [NB -- These numbers have gone up considerably since 1999]
When to Use What Search Site
When you want quick and simple results, without having to learn anything about search engine syntax or commands, try Excite www.excite.com, Lycos www.lycos.com or InfoSeek www.infoseek.com. Just enter a word or two or three, and you'll get your results directory-style--with a handful of "recommended" sites at the top of the list, followed by results from a directory, then followed by general Web index results. The emphasis is on easy of use rather than precision or power.
By the way, don't be fooled at Lycos. Their search form is at the top of the page and looks likes it's part of a banner ad. You could easily miss it and think that all they had was their directory choices.
Excite adds an interesting twist known as "intelligent search". In addition to looking for occurrences of the exact words in your query, it also matches synonyms, and not just from a thesaurus, also based on what it has learned about related concepts from the documents in its index. Excite gives the example that a search for "elderly people financial concerns" would find both sites mentioning the economic status of retired people and the financial concerns of senior citizens. To use this feature, click on "Results for Other Possible Interpretations" under the query box. (NB--The need to "understand" the meaning of the content limits this approach to English language Web pages.)
Newcomer Google www.google.com ranks the results based on the number of links to a particular site. It uses that as a measure of "popularity," even though it is probably more a measure of how long the site has been active. It takes time for people to recognize how good a site is and to create links to it; and then it takes many months before those sites get indexed again by Google. As with Excite, Infoseek, and Lycos, here you are basically limited to typing in a few words. Google does, however, have one very helpful unique feature. Your results list shows the piece of text where your query words appear, so you can see the context and judge if that's what you really want.
AltaVista, Inktomi, and Northern Light www.northernlight.com give you far greater power over the results you get.
In the HotBot www.hotbot.com version of Inktomi, you can click on "More Search Options" and use pre-set forms to indicate your choices. (HotBot was created by the publishers of Wired Magazine, and retains the magazine's flashy graphic look-and-feel.)
To control your query at Northern Light, click on "Power Pearch." There you'll find pre-set forms similar to those at HotBot, however, you can search not only through Web pages, but also through over 5000 full text documents in their "Special Collection." These documents aren't available on the Web, because the people/companies who created them want to be paid for them. The cost for an article is usually in the range of $2.
You'll find Northern Light particularly valuable when you are looking for current news. News sites typically keep their stories in databases, which search engine robots can't normally access. And news changes far faster than the typical search engine updates its index. This special service at Northern Light allows you to search through 33 online news sources with a single query, rather than having to go to their separate sites.
At AltaVista, you have three different ways to search. Simple Search is what you see first. There, just like at Excite or InfoSeek, you can type a few words and get good results quickly. And once you get your results, you can choose to "refine" your search, providing you with automatically generated categories associated with your category words, and even a graphical view of your choices, to help step you through constructing a more complex query that includes some terms and excludes others. If you click on Advanced Search, you arrive at a realm where you can use a series of commands to very precisely define what you want.
For example, go to AltaVista. Click on Advanced. In the top (ranking) box, describe with a series of words what you want to buy. In the bottom (query) box, type the words "for sale" (including quotation marks). Then click Search, and you'll see a hyperlinked list of Web pages that match what you're looking for.
You can refine your search by entering dates -- to get only the most recent information. When two or more words must appear in a certain order, enclose them in quotations marks so they will be treated as a phrase.
The commands that you use in the bottom (query) box are:
AltaVista also allows you to search not just the Web, but the Internet wildlands known as "newsgroups." To get to that area, click on "Usenet" under "Specialty Searches." ("Usenet" is a term left over from the old pre-Web pioneering days of the Internet.) We'll give some examples of what you can do with Advanced Search later in the chapter when we talk about newsgroups.
For its initial demo, iAtlas is partnering with Inktomi. You can do a search at the iAtlas site and filter your results by industry or by city. It can also enable searches by zip code and site popularity, iAtlas says. Their approach should make it possible to create directories (for instance of a city) automatically, rather than by hand. By the time you read this book, dozens of popular Web sites will probably have adopted this approach, broadening the range of how you can find what you want when you want it.
Comparison Shopping, the Lazy Way
In your first online shopping excursions, you will probably focus on a few stores that you know through real-world equivalents, that you have heard about through advertising or from friends, and that you found easily and quickly by way of a major portal site.
As you become aware that there are a wide range of choices, and you'll gain greater confidence in the reliability of stores you might never have heard of before, you will want to compare prices--especially for brand-name, mass-manufactured merchandise, that should be identical in quality regardless of the retailer. The major portal sites are either adding software or linking to other sites that make price comparison extremely easy. There is no need to go to a dozen or more separate stores and take notes on the prices offered for the goods you want. Rather, you can go to a single comparison site that covers that class of goods, enter a specific query--the kind of product, the brand, the specific model or size, even major options--and learn which stores carry it and what they charge for it.
If you know exactly what you want -- a brand-named, mass-manufactured item -- and all that matters to you is price, then try one of the following sites. The look and feel of these sites are likely to be very similar since many use the same software, which typically sends out a robot program or Web crawler (like a search engine gathering information for its index). The difference lies in what kind of stores, how many stores, and which stores they include in their results, all of which change very rapidly.
Note also that sites offering price comparison searches typically provide a hyperlinked "buy" buttons next to every item in the results list they display. But, in most cases, clicking that button does not add your choice to a common mall-like shopping cart. Rather it takes you to the actual vendor's page, the one who is offering that quoted price, and you have to make all your purchases separately. In all probability, common shopping carts should be introduced soon.
For quality comparisons, seek sites that focus on a single category of product (like all the sites that sell books), and sites that provide easy access to information (usually more than just price) from many vendors. Some of these might use multi-stage search technology that lets you specify all the key parameters necessary to configure a complex product like a computer. The site then would provide you with a list of vendors who can deliver such a product in your price range. We'll introduce you to some sites like that in our shopping tours, which span Chapters 4 through 10.
You can also check the online version of Consumer Reports www.consumerreports.com. Casual visitors get general consumer advice. For a paid subscription fee (currently $2.95 per month or $24 per year), you get access to product and service comparisons, ratings, and recommendations.
Consider also:
To get a sense of what the current generation of bots can do, check BotSpot www.botspot.com. In particular, test drive the applications highlighted in their "Best of the Bots" section, as well as the shopbots list at www.botspot.com/search/s-shop.htm.
Today, the most common bots just investigate multiple search engines for you. If you have only a vague idea of what you want and would only enter a word or two as a query, that might be a useful alternative. If you find yourself in this situation, try InferenceFind www.infind.com, and you may be able to locate the item you need.
This method of searching, however, takes away your ability to take advantage of the unique and powerful search commands at such sites as AltaVista, HotBot, and Northern Light. If you have a clear idea of what you are looking for, you are better off mastering the capabilities of a single search engine, rather than using a bot to submit a poorly constructed query to dozens of separate search engines, with a single command.
In the future, bots might serve as your own personal shoppers. Securely supplied with your passwords and credit card information, a properly engineered bot could perform a wide variety of tasks for you, including not only finding goods and information at the prices you want, but actually making the purchases for you. Imagine telling a bot to keep an eye on the price of certain stocks, and giving it the authority to buy and sell for you as soon as those stocks hit certain price points. Or, imagine using a bot to continuously scan through auction and classified ad sites for hard-to-find items you desperately want, and then to buy or bid for it, at a price within your guidelines.
Recently, the increased use of a new standard known as "XML" has simplified the work performed by bots and shopping-oriented search engines. Many commercial sites will include special coding in their Web documents to identify that they have products for sale and the types of products, and at what prices. That coding will make it much easier for a bot to fetch and compare information of this kind.
In other words, these Web documents will "describe themselves" in a way that makes it possible for the entire Web to operate like a single unified database. When this standard is in widespread use, you should be able to ask detailed, structured questions, and search the catalogs of hundreds of thousands or even millions of stores with a single click.
For the online equivalent of yard sales, you might want to venture into newsgroups. In Chapter 3, we'll talk about how to use newsgroups and other forms of online discussion to get help and advice from other shoppers. If your main intent is to buy through newsgroups, your best starting point is AltaVista. From the area called "Specialty Searches," click on Usenet. AltaVista will then display a query box. Enter the phrase
+newsgroups:forsale +whateveryouwant
and replace "whateveryouwant" with the type of item for which you are looking. If you are entering a phrase rather than a single word, put the phrase in quotation marks and put a + sign in front of the first quotation mark. When you get your list of results, to read an entry, just click on its name. If you want to get in touch with the person who posted the information and is selling the item, click on the associated email address. Keep in mind that while you will see many tempting offers in newsgroups, be cautious. No one but the seller is providing you with any assurances about your would-be purchase. Responding to these ads is like responding to notes posted on a bulletin board at your local grocery store, except the seller probably doesn't live in your neighborhood or even your city -- he or she might even be in another country.
If you want to post your own ad in a newsgroup and have never used newsgroups before, your best place to start is at Deja.com www.deja.com. Be sure to read the general information at Deja that explains what newsgroups are, how they work,and the proper way to use them. Follow the instructions there for finding the right newsgroup(s) to post your item in, and how to do the posting from the Deja site.
Similar to face-to-face auctions, you are bidding against other people who want the same goods, and who, like you, are looking for a great bargain or trying to get hold of something that is very hard to find. But unlike a live auction, you don't have to be on hand at a certain time, and you don't have to wait while the auctioneer sells all the other goods on which you have no interest in bidding. With an online auction, you click from item to item and bid on any item[md]or items[md]you like, however often you like. Each item being auctioned has a certain timeframe that it will be offered for sale. As each offered item's auction deadline approaches, the online action intensifies. The name of the game is to just barely outbid the next highest bidder, as near to the deadline as possible. Then you "win," and have the honor of paying for and receiving the merchandise. At the auction's close, you[md]the buyer[md]deal directly with the item's seller to arrange payment, shipping the purchased item, and any remaining details.
At some auction sites, you buy directly from the manufacturer or from a store rather than an individuals, and the merchandise for sale is new or refurbished. These sites, designed to quickly turn overstocked inventory into cash, often go out of their way to heighten the excitement and draw buyers back. Some hold "flash auctions" -- auctions which begin and end in a very short time period, rather than lasting for days or weeks, which is common at sites where individuals sell to one another. For instance, at First Auction (www.firstauction.com) you will find numerous auctions that last just 30 minutes, and where the first bid -- even on merchandise worth hundreds of dollars -- is always just $1. Such a set up can easily create a bidding frenzy.
Like a competitive contest, participating in online auctions can become very exciting. Especially at a "flash auction," you might get caught up in the competitive thrill of the moment. If you are not cautious, you could wind up buying things you don't want or need. As with gambling, you could become addicted. But if you can manage to maintain some self control, you can find bargains and hard-to-find collectibles--along with enjoying the exhilarating experience. One additional sideline benefit is that you'll meet lots of people online who have similar interests to yours. Here is a listing of a few sites to get you started in the thrilling world of online auction activity:
Want to go to a physical store to see, touch, and maybe buy something you found online? Go to the Web site Mapquest www.mapquest.com, to request map and driving instructions for free to a local store that is associated with the online store.
For mail-in rebates on products from electronics to toys, check The Rebate Company www.rebateco.com. Many of their products are completely free after the rebate.
Are you finding good stuff on the Web, saving the documents, then having difficulty weeding through what you've saved? Then go to AltaVista www.altavista.com, and download AltaVista Discovery software for free. This software indexes all the content on your hard drive, and lets you find everything you want instantly, with the same look-and-feel as the AltaVista Search site.
If a page is temporarily unavailable due to system or network problems, or if the page no longer exists on the Web, Google will provide it for you. The service saves all the pages that it indexes, and can serve them up on request.
Hungry for more? If you want to learn more about recent developments in search engines and directories, check Search Engine Watch www.searchenginewatch.com and subscribe to its monthly email reports.
When considering similar product offerings at different sites, open two or more copies of your browser and reduce the browser's size so you can view two separate copies of the browser with individual product descriptions and pictures at the same time. Or, you can run two individual browsers and quickly bounce back and forth between the two or more browsers.
Put the "eGenie" to work for you. Connect to egenie.opensesame.com. As you explore this site's categories of entertainment, including TV, movies, books, and music, the eGenie "bot" will "learn" your tastes, based simply on your choices. eGenie will then automatically generate a list of Web sites and web location recommendations tailored for you.
Test drive the bots at www.wisewire.com/trialwires2.html In particular, see the "Sample Tech Toy Wires," including computer hardware, audio systems, and cellular phones. You'll see hyperlinked lists of Web pages linking you to those items. The linked sites listed by the bots are rated by visitors to those Web sites.
Clear out your attic and basement of old books and knickknacks, things that you once collected and now no longer care about. Go to eBay www.ebay.com and put them up for sale. You'll get cash you can use on your next shopping trip, and you'll free up space to accommodate the new stuff you pick up.
For more shopping resources, check our Online Shopping Directorywww.samizdat.com/shopping.html
For more about Internet search see www.samizdat.com/search.html
The rest of the book (Shop Online the Lazy Way):
Part One covers aspects of online shopping that apply no matter what you want to buy.
This site is Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. (617) 469-2269. seltzer@samizdat.com
Please visit our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat
You may also want to check Richard's Online Shopping Directory www.samizdat.com/shopping.html, which has links to all the sites mentioned in the entire book, plus sites he has learned of since the book went into production.
Return to B&R Samizdat Express
For a thorough discussion of this topic, buy Richard's book Web Business
Bootcamp (published by Wiley) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471164194/brsamizdatexpres
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