Monday, October 30, 2006
Compete Officially Launching Wednesday
I just got off the phone with the folks from Compete.com and found the call to be fairly interesting though they still have a few things to work out with their featureset. Compete is what I call a version 2 of meta search. Others nowadays dump meta search engines into the mashups category but I like to refine my taxonomy a bit more than that. So Compete takes it's search results directly from Yahoo (from a partnership of sorts, details of which have not been disclosed) and overlay 3 pieces of data regarding the search results so you can know a bit more about the site before you actualy go there. The three pieces of data are as follows...1.) Trust Trustworthiness of site
2.) Rank Popularity of site (main domain, not url specific).
3.) Deals Are there any known deals for the site (syndicating deals from Coupon Mountain).
There are some cool UI features like the ability (dubbed Snapshot) to compare competing sites against each other to see how they do in terms of unique visitors, rank, pages per visit and average stay of visitors. However, I must say that I believe this data is skewed but not sure in which directions. Think Alexa but instead of being skewed for technology it appears to be just the opposite. I also appears that smaller sites (less than 1 million page views a month) are grossly inaccurate but perhaps it's because they don't include bot stats in their calculations, not sure).
Any way you cut it, the success of compete is in their ability to get users to click on coupons and Yahoo's sponsored links at the top of search results. In order to do that they have to get a large amount of people to change the way they search and/or download their toolbar and I'm not sure I see either of those happening for some time.
The deals button makes sense but I don't like the fact that the deals only come from CouponMountain. I know there are other trustworthy coupon sites out there that have direct deals with merchants and deals should've been struck there before Compete launched. They did say that they plan on moving towards the user submitted coupons route but I can only imagine the nightmare that will ensue when that happens. I say stick with 10 trustworthy coupon vendors and that's it and make sure you RSS-ify the site snapshots so people can start integrating the data in free tools and build the word of mouth buzz that way. Working on user generated coupons is worse than building a new search engine entirely.
Posted By Jason Dowdell at 01:36 PM
Permanent Link: Compete Officially Launching Wednesday
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