TheFind relaunched as “buying engine”

While Bing advertises itself as a “decision engine” (should we understand “shopping engine”?), TheFind relaunches itself today as a “buying engine”. From the press release:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Oct. 14. TheFind today unveiled a first-of-its-kind “buying engine” that helps shoppers find everything they need to make smart purchase decisions. TheFind now integrates Product Search, Coupon Search, Review Search, Local Shopping Search and Green Shopping Search into a single “universal” search engine at http://www.thefind.com, where over 350 million products from 500,000 stores and online sellers can be found. With this comprehensive set of shopping search tools and information, TheFind is now the best and last place consumers need to look before making any purchase.

With this relaunch, TheFind keeps getting innovative: the new set of features is impressive, but even more, we feel there is still an untapped potential (see my comments on the Review Search).

New branding

This new positioning as “buying engine” is visible from the home page:

• New logo (personal taste: I like it!)
• New tagline (“With TheFind, It’s Shopped & Found”) explained in more details: “Find every product from every store, every coupon and every review. Everything you need to quickly decide what to buy and where to buy it”. It’s all about comprehensiveness!
• New “vertical search” options to highlight the new Coupon Search and Review Search. Existing Product Search / Local Shopping Search / Green Shopping Search are available as part of the options.

There is a Google-ish style to this homepage: from the previous homepage that was already search-oriented, all unnecessary elements (gradient background, top bar…) have been removed, providing a somehow minimalistic experience. Less is more :)

Product Search

Mostly aesthetic changes:

• Same treatment as the homepage: try to strip down any element that is only decoration; the focus is on the products, not the site. For me, it seems a similar approach to the recent redesign of Pronto.com; and I clearly like this trend in web design.
• New semi-fluid design (1400px wide max), taking the benefits of big screens to display more products.
• I don’t get the animation used in the search bar: entering a keyword then pressing the “search” button, what appears to be a logo (the red square with vertical white line) is being moved onto the right of the search box while the keyword is pushed on the left… Mostly useless and annoying to me.

On the product display itself, the revamped extended view (displayed when rolling over a product) now shows a lot more info, extending the existing tab system:

• On the first tab: basic information regarding the offer (title, description, price), a first coupon (second tab), and merchant certifications
• The Coupon tab shows all available coupons (if too many, then with a link to the new Coupon Search)
• The Review tab shows web results containing reviews of the product (again, if too many, a link to the new Review Search is displayed)
• The Store tab showing merchant data. This is an impressive panel – part of the UpFront initiative launched a few months ago – I don’t think any other shopping engines have such detailed and useful merchant info pages (furthermore embedded in each product).

New Coupon Search

Based on the recent acquisition of iStorez.com (www.iStorez.com now redirects to coupons.thefind.com), the new Coupon Search provides search capacities, including filtering by stores / category / brand, on an impressive number of coupons. Some social features are there to rate each coupon and share on social networks. RSS feed is also a nice addition to be aware of new coupons.

New Review Search

Basically a Yahoo!BOSS-powered search engine tuned to display web results related to product reviews and guides. While it is a nice addition (close to the “Research” option of Become), I wanted more :) Considering TheFind is a crawl-based shopping engine, I imagined a review aggregator site, where shoppers could directly read reviews on TheFind. Let’s wait for the V2 :)