Comments on: Do Meta-Shopping Engines Find Better Deals?

By: johnrocks

johnrocks — Mon, 04 May 2009 07:26:31 +0000

OxyShopping is a shopping search site that enables shoppers to quickly and easily find products from various Indian online stores.

If you leave the cluttered UI, OxyShopping is actually a good meta engine implementation that collects data from various sites.

Products are classified under relevant categories like Mobile, Clothes, Computer etc and buying process happens at the original site.

Though OxyShopping has a long way to go in terms of building a usable UI (for e.g. ability to sort results based on price, de-cluttering etc), OxyShopping is a good stuff and does fill a gap.

johnrocks

Cheap Deals

By: Bob Carpenter

Bob Carpenter — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 21:01:53 +0000

Did you run into problems with prices changing? I know Amazon twiddles their prices all the time (and I suspect they might charge me more as a Prime member).

To really do this solidly, you’d have to order the items to verify they were in stock and actually available at the prices quoted online.

By: Sam

Sam — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:11:46 +0000

On a tangent, what was the error rate that you observed from Mechanical Turk?

Sam

By: Patrick

Patrick — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 09:08:44 +0000

This is interesting! Thanks for making the effort to provide data. It looks like a lot is missing from the file you made public, though. Why are there only 40 rows? Also, why are some items repeated twice? Do you have the raw prices found by each turker? How many workers did you assign to each item?

Deeper question: What does it say about America that “Harley Parking Only Violators Will Be Crushed” is on a list of popular items?

By: Panos Ipeirotis

Panos Ipeirotis — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 07:28:30 +0000

Also remember that when you are buying from any online merchant, you are not paying only for the product but also for the quality of the transaction (aka merchant reputation). Knowing that you are going to receive the item, knowing that the item will arrive on time, that it is easy to return, and so on, are all priced (typically) in the price offered by each merchant.

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 20:51:25 +0000

Nice investigation. By the way, I noticed that both PriceGrabber and Shopping.com appear to take into account tax and shipping in their final prices.

By: Ted Howard

Ted Howard — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 02:29:50 +0000

Could you add Live Search Cashback (http://search.live.com/cashback) to that test? I, and I’m sure many others, would be curious to see the results.

I think Brendano’s logic is off. I say that a meta^infinity engine would likely converge on the arbitrage-free ratio under the assumption of open access to information. Of course, that’s excluding slippage, transaction feeds, taxes, … [efficient market derivatives humor]

By: brendano

brendano — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 00:33:06 +0000

This seems to indicate that
A meta-meta engine is better than a meta-engine.

This raises questions.

Is a meta-meta-meta engine better than a meta-meta engine?
Is a meta^k engine better than a meta^k-1 engine?
Does a meta^infinity engine converge on average savings?

(maybe yes: a thousand turkers would do little better than a hundred. i would guess.)

Need to know before Christmas.

-brendan