New Options at Yahoo Shopping
This InternetNews.com story: Yahoo Launches Precision Browsing discusses some new refinement/narrowing options at Yahoo Shopping for some (not all) products.
Yahoo Shopping was also enhanced with new technology going live on Thursday. The improvements help users narrow their searches by clicking on a list of product attributes returned with results, a strategy that combines old-styled browsing with search. Yahoo calls this “precision browsing.”
A Yahoo Shopping search for shoes allows you to quickly narrow/refine your results by:
+ Price
+ Store
+ Type
It also mentions that more narrowing options are coming soon.
A search for dvd player allows the searcher to refine:
+ By Latest Price
+ By Manufacturer
+ By Disc Capacity
+ Dolby Digital Decoder
+ Other Media Supported
+ Progressive Scan
You’re also to combine refinements. For example, show only DVD players with a price between $130 – $229 and manufactured by Sony.
Useful? Absolutely!
However, this new feature from Yahoo Shopping is not a new idea in the shopping search space.
Other shopping engines also allow the searcher to refine their results using criteria developed for specific product categories. Here are a couple of examples.
The recently launched Snap.com offers several refinement options based on product type. For example, here’s a search for laptop computers. You’ll see the refinements listed at the top of the page.
This is also the case at AOL’s Pinpoint Shopping and Shopping.com.
Yahoo also offers “SmartSort” which allows the searcher the ability to interact with product reviews for consumer electronic products by manipulating “sliders.”