Best of the Bots
Shopping for Shopping Bots
Part 5
By James Maguire
Jango
Jango presents a truly bare bones front page with
no graphics downloads will slow down the shopper in a hurry. There's a multitude
of categories, from fragrances to golf equipment to the ever-present Pokemon.
And, since it's a part of the Excite search engine, Jango's front page also
offers options like People Finder and Webcast Finder.
Choosing the "digital camera" link
displayed a multiple choice page that enabled us to shop by model, manufacturer
or type. Or, we could search for product reviews - a nice feature. Choosing
"video" under camera type provided excellent variety: 113 offers from
18 Web sites.
We clicked on some of the items to read more
about them, pausing for perhaps 20 minutes. But when we wanted to skip to the
end of the list, Jango said that, "too much time has elapsed since you ran
the original search." We needed to run the search again to be able to view
the product choices. This message was provided on a page with no navigation bar
or search capability - not the most effective interface design.
We wanted to learn why it behaved in this way --
apparently the bot must constantly refresh the product list, making a search
obsolete with the addition of new information. However, there was no information
on the site about this. Nor was there an e-mail link to customer service.
So, we re-searched and got the same 113 offers
from 18 Web sites. After all that, the product selection was impressive, from
the Kensington VideoCam for $49.95 to the Canon XL1 for $4,499.00. The Panasonic
PVDV910 was offered for $747.00 by Digital and Video, a very competitive price.
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