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Best of the Bots
Shopping for Shopping Bots
Part 3
By James Maguire
DealTime
DealTime's search technology keeps working even
when you leave the site. Enter the item you want and the price you're willing to
pay, and DealTime will keep you informed by e-mail, pager, or a desktop icon you
download.
DealTIme's cheery, streamlined front page offers
a wide range of product categories, as well as several suggested searches on hot
items (laser printers, palm pilots, etc.). Choosing the "digital
camera" link took us to a multiple choice search page that had an
interesting feature: we could specify what types of vendors to include or
exclude in the search. The choices
were online stores, auctions, buying groups, person to person auction and
classifieds.
Oddly, choosing the "digital camera"
link and doing a keyword search using "digital camcorder" yielded no
results. We retraced our tracks one step to the Electronic category and
re-entered the search term. However, the selection was impressive: 200 offers from 72
merchant and auction vendors. At the low end was the Logitech Quickcam for
$79.00, and at the high end was Sony DCR-TRV510 for $1,049.95. The Panasonic
PVDV910 was offered by online retailer for $728, which was the best price we
found on any shopping site.
The list of items could be ordered by
"merchant rating" in addition to price, manufacturer and model.
However, an extensive search of the site revealed no information about how the
merchants were rated. And only the top few vendors in a list of 72 received a
rating (ranging from five stars down to three and a half).
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