GTE Compiles Super Shopping List for Online Shoppers

Online phone book GTE SuperPages.com is putting together an online directory of e-commerce sites, aimed at providing shoppers with a single place to find out where on the net their coveted goods reside.

Web searching “spiders” are using a new classification technology from GTE Labs to put the list together. The database forms the foundation for a new shopping search engine GTE launched this week on SuperPages.com.

GTE redesigned SuperPages.com to highlight the new shopping feature, which enables consumers to get a complete list of the online storefronts that sell the specific goods they are looking for. The GTE site eliminates the need for consumers to search each Web site separately or to guess which sites may have the items they need.

How the Spiders Work

The spiders first look for sites that have certain online shopping features. Then they take an inventory of all the products available for sale on that site. The resulting database responds to common language consumers enter on the SuperPages shopping search page.

To narrow the results list, the search engine processes specific descriptions of products to find the closest match — such as “dark blue carpenter-style jeans,” instead of just returning a mile-long list of “jeans.”

GTE says it does not play favorites when listing the companies that have products matching the consumer’s search request. The results are listed in order of importance, starting with the closest match to the shopper’s criteria. Similar to standard Web site search engines, therefore, it is in the Web site operator’s best interest to provide detailed product descriptions on the site to get listed close to the top of the SuperPages results list.

The SuperPages list provides a link either to the entire Web site or the specific Web page on which the product was found.

SuperPages.com, which has more than 11 million businesses and thousands of advertisers listed, receives more than 4.5 million visits per month and conducts 12 million Yellow Pages searches.

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