TheFind.com is one of the most popular comparison shopping engines in existence. It rivals even the biggest product marketplaces including Amazon, eBay, Google Product Search and Yahoo! Shopping. TheFind is one of my personal favorites and I always find myself going back because of the great shopping experiences I have had there. TheFind shopping search engine uses their “Product Ranking Engine” to deliver comprehensive lists of products and their corresponding images, ranked by the leading products, brands, stores and styles on the very first page of results. Their comparison engine displays products across several categories including apparel, shoes, accessories and seasonal items.

We have posted several times about TheFind.com in the past including their Back-to-School shopping promo with PayPal, their shopping widgets and even covered their acquisition of Glimpse.com, a high fashion site they acquired back in August.

TheFind.com Blog:

TheFind’s blog features regularly posted content about shopping and fashion, including news surrounding TheFind shopping search. From the blog you can view popular style guides, featured finds, hot picks and more. It also features the regular blog archives, tag cloud, blogroll, recent posts, a search feature and, of course, RSS or email subscriptions. TheFind recently announced the addition of noted fashion journalist Merle Ginsberg who is launching a weekly blog exclusively for TheFind.com consumers called “The Click.” Merle’s new blog will cover the latest trends in shopping across multiple genres including fashion, beauty and home.

Check Out TheFind Blog & Subscribe to their Feed!!

TheFind.com Hot Searches:

TheFind features regular updates to their hot searches page and even includes them on the homepage so shoppers can see what’s hot right now and what shoppers are searching for on TheFind. I think this is a great feature for them to concentrate on, it works for gift ideas, purchase ideas and even allows you to discover new items. Many CSE’s use hot searches, but very few use them right. I think TheFind is one of the few that does hot searches right.

Check Out ALL of TheFind’s Hot Searches!!

Siva Kumar Answers 10 Questions About TheFind.com:

Roughly how many merchants are included within TheFind.com?

Over 500,000 merchants that service the US market are currently included for searches done on TheFind.com. As your readers may know, our technology is different from that of the comparison engines in that we have crawlers that spider merchants’ web sites to index all of the products that are for sale. We also accept data feeds and process feeds from all of the feed service providers like Channel Adviser, Channel Intelligence, Mercent, Merchant Advantage, SingleFeed and others.

Roughly how many products are included within TheFind.com?

Our search engine indexes more products from more sellers than any other shopping search site. At present, our index is nearly 190,000,000 products from the 500,0000 merchants for the US market. We are in the middle of upgrading our crawl and extraction infrastructure and I expect that the number of products indexed to grow significantly in the next few weeks. These 190 million are all items that are available for sale in US dollars and shippable to US locations. Our algorithms automatically exclude from this number any adult products, prescription drugs and such items that are not family friendly.

Roughly how many individuals currently work on TheFind.com support and coding teams?

We are still a small company and number less than 30 people in total. Much of the staff is engaged in development and testing of our search engine.

What other places across the Internet, if any, are merchants and products included?

We cover all areas of shopping search including the computers and electronics categories typically emphasized by the comparison engines. Consumers will find our search experience is especially well suited for the fast growing lifestyle goods categories including clothing and accessories, home and garden, sports and outdoor, kids and family, and health and beauty. At present our efforts just focus on merchants that sell products for the US market (accept US dollars and ship to the US).

In addition to www.TheFind.com, we also have specialized sites to reach vertical or horizontal slices of shopping. For example, www.TheFindGreen.com helps consumers who are eco-conscious find just green products from “green” stores and “green” brands. In addition, http://paypal.thefind.com enables PayPal account holders to look for items to buy from any of the 80,000 or so merchants that accept PayPal.

What, in your opinion, are the highlight features TheFind.com offers it’s users?

TheFind is the first shopping search engine built from the ground up to help consumers find whatever they are looking to buy from all the places that sell that item. This is a simple proposition but technically so complex that none of the comparison engines have been able to do this so far. Our technology makes this difficult task into something that consumers will find really easy to use. In a nutshell, we want to combine the art and science of shopping into our powerful little search engine so that TheFind.com could be the first and last place that online shoppers need to go to start shopping.

What, in your opinion are the highlight features TheFind.com offers merchants?

We have a unique business model compared to the other companies engaged in shopping search in that we do not charge merchants a click fee to list their products unlike every other comparison shopping site. All listings on TheFind are free to merchants and we actively crawl merchants’ web sites so that even data feeds are not necessary. We want to provide true and objective relevancy to the consumer by ranking the results based on the merchants carrying the most matching products and this helps merchants that specialize in certain categories to show up higher in relevance when searches are done in these categories.

Merchants can make use of some of our innovative marketing channels like our Mouse-over Banner to advertise to the targeted consumers looking for things to buy. We also have sponsored results spots, clearly marked as such, that appear above the search results – these are also advertising sold on a CPC basis to merchants.

Are new features being added and updated often? How often would you say?

We are continually adding new and visible capabilities to TheFind.com that are aimed at helping consumers search and shop better. Invisibly we also continually improving the number of merchants and products we index and the search quality algorithms.

How does TheFind.com plan to stay competitive with sites like Amazon and eBay marketplaces?

TheFind.com does not compete with Amazon and eBay in that we are not an e-commerce site and do not sell products. In fact our search results include all of the products from Amazon and from eBay so that consumers don’t have to wonder about what these companies have for sale that matches what they may be looking for. Our goal is to be the best resource for consumers to help them find what they are looking for from all of the online stores selling them. In this sense, we more directly displace the consumers’ use of Web search engines to start off shopping searches. The experience in using a general purpose Web search engine is very time consuming and inefficient for a shopper and this is what we aim to change.

Where do you see TheFind.com in the next 3-5 years?

TheFind.com will be a year-old at the end of October. We have a major upgrade of our engine underway before the start of the shopping season that will deliver our site in a “production” solution as part of the anniversary celebration. In three to five years we hope to have established ourselves as the best place to start people’s online shopping and the preferred search destination for shopping on the Web.

What Online product marketplaces, other than TheFind.com, do you personally use to shop from?

TheFind.com is of course not an online marketplace but a search engine for shopping and I typically always start my shopping from TheFind.com. Stores that I buy things from online vary from the large ones like Amazon and Nordstrom to smaller specialty stores and marketplaces like eBay.

Conclusion & Final Thoughts:

I urge anyone who is not yet familiar with TheFind to quickly become familiar and take some time to at least see what they have to offer. My bet is you won’t be disappointed, whether you are shopping for a product you love or you are a merchant trying to get listed in a top-notch comparison shopping engine. The features, platform, tools and strategic partnerships make TheFind a great choice for both shoppers and eTailers. Two things I like most are that they are crawler based (meaning they use a web-based crawler like Google to find products) and they have put tons of time, money and resources into their company in order to provide the most accurate, up-to-date, feature rich shopping destination they could. In case you couldn’t tell, TheFind is a winner all around in my book!

To Siva: I thoroughly enjoyed reading your responses and getting to know your company a little more. I truly appreciate all the time and thought that went into your responses to the interview questions we provided and appreciate your participation more than you could imagine. It gives me great pleasure to report on things I love and it is so darn fun too. Please don’t hesitate to keep us in the loop about future happening at TheFind. I would love to help spread the word more in the future about any new features, tools or releases. Keep up the quality work and let your team know how much we all appreciate their efforts.

To our readers: I hope you enjoyed reading this QandA with Siva from TheFind. I plan on doing several more interviews with other comparison shopping engine founders, marketers and employees in the future along with the ones we have already conducted. If you haven’t already, be sure to grab our articles feed so you don’t miss any of our upcoming CSE and product listing site interviews!

TheFind.com is Featured as one of the comparison shopping engines on our Product Listing Guide!