Announced about a month ago, Become.com is a shopping search engine that its creators claim is vastly superior to its competitors. These guys can put some wood behind that particular arrow, collectively they were responsible for MySimon (now owned by Cnet) and Wisenut (now owned by LookSmart).
I spoke to Michael Yang, Become CEO, and Yeogirl Yun, the CTO. The founders have developed a new ranking technology – they call it the “Affiinity Ranking Index,” or AIR – which applies a unique combination of math and human editing. Before it does any math, Become puts people in the process of determining relevance for particular shopping-related search topics. A team of editors contextualize pages based on how they relate to each other, then those pages are crawled, and Become’s AIR algorithm is applied.
I can’t really grok how AIR works, but this is from a draft release on AIR: “AIR identifies exceptional web pages by understanding the level of interconnection between valuable sites from within specific fields of interest. AIR evaluates a web page based on what other “knowledgeable” sites in that specific field say about the page, and also evaluates the page based on what the page says about other “knowledgeable” sites in the specific field.”
“Unlike Become.com’s AIR, Google’s PageRank estimates the popularity of a given web page by looking only at links into the page and doing so without any understanding of context. Become.com’s AIR, on the other hand, considers a site to be valuable if 1) it receives links from valuable sites within a similar topic of interest and 2) if it provides links to other valuable sites within a similar topic of interest (while minimizing links to off-topic sites). ”
I pressed Yang and Yun for more details – PageRank is published, after all. But they were mum, save adding that their inspiration was Applied Physics and Engineering Dynamics – two fields in which I must confess I am not very keen. I chided them a bit – after all, calling your new algorithm AIR, but not publishing it might just open one up to some jokes – but they do have the right to protect trade secrets, after all.
The proof is in the use of the engine itself. It’s in a registration-based beta, so you’ll need to sign up. I used it, although cursorily, and I did like how it seems to understand the intent behind a shopping query – it’s not a product search engine, like Froogle, instead it seems to give you a lot of information that helps you in your process of buying. Yang added that a comparison feature is coming.
Yang and Yun hope to take Become and AIR across many vertical search areas – health, people, travel, etc. Given these guys backgrounds, it’s worth checking out.