When it comes to navigating the mushrooming world of online shopping, you need some high-tech help. You need a shopping bot.
Bots are specialized search engines that prowl the vast aisles of the Web, keeping track of inventory and prices at hundreds of sites.But a lot of bots are not too hot. When we put these automatons through their paces, some returned poorly organized results, searched a disappointingly small corner of the Web or, worse, couldn't seem to find any bargains. Still, bot technology is getting better, and there are a couple of bots worth taking for a whirl.
Our top two picks are MySimon and PriceScan. Both operate using the Yellow Pages model -- they include every retailer they can, but only stores that pay extra get higher-visibility listings.
MySimon's bots use a virtual-learning technology. They watch professional Web shoppers and mimic the humans' surfing techniques to find where the products and prices are.
Then the bots catalog the sites up to several times a day, depending on how busy each site is. MySimon searches more than 1,300 merchants. To prevent trouble, MySimon will remove merchants that users complain about (it's only happened to one seller so far).
Yet for all this usability, MySimon didn't come up with the lowest bid on our tests. The low-price honor went instead to PriceScan, a no-frills site.
PriceScan uses bots to scour the Web in "real time" -- that is, whenever a user inputs a query -- and combines it with its own database of off-line merchants, such as catalog retailers. The lowest price for a product was displayed with the product's name, and clicking on the name brought up a list of retailers selling at various prices.
In finding the low bid, though, we realized a drawback of PriceScan: Unless the merchant has paid for a direct link to the product's order page from PriceScan, you have to wend through a merchant's site from the front door to find the same match PriceScan did -- a hair-pulling experience if the site is badly organized.
And while PriceScan does let you search for certain attributes of a product so you can see equivalent models, the listings come back only as model numbers, so it's best if you're already familiar with the products you're looking for.