Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Answers.com about Shopping.com

Gary Price posts about Answers.com's deal to integrate product information from Shopping.com.

Answers.com is a metasearch engine that hits specialized databases to try to directly answer your query rather than returning a list of web pages that might contain the answer to your query. More information in my earlier post, "Answers.com launches".

Google.com recently switched their word definitions links from Dictionary.com to Answers.com. I'm curious if this new deal could put some new strain on that relationship. After all, Shopping.com and Google's Froogle are similar metashopping search engines.

As the overlap increases, helping GuruNet's Answers.com may start to be less and less in Google's interests. Google's word definitions could just as easily be provided by Wikipedia directly or by a homegrown combination of dictionary and Wikipedia content.

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