Bloody price comparison sites

OK, at first they were a good idea but now they're really starting to get on my tits. They're particularly annoying when you're looking for information or a review about a product using Google. For example, I'm considering buying an Olympus P400 dye-sub photo printer and I wanted to find some reviews on the net. Google for "Olympus P440 review" though and all I got was pages and pages of pricegrabber and similar sites . I waded through 7 pages of Google hits for price comparison sites before giving up.

There are one or two decent price comparison sites out there. One of the earliest is www.bookbrain.co.uk which is owned by a mate of mine and just does books. The vast majority though are little more than advertising placeholders of little or no use which just spam up the google search results.

Michael.

PS: If anyone here has any experience of using the Oly P400 or P440 dye sub printers I'd like to know what you think of them.

 

Bang on Mike, it pisses the hell out of me, you can put any search you like in and bang bloody Keleko and the others always at the top, seriously does anyone use these sites?

And always on the right hand side ebay, I have searched for jobs before and ebay has come up on the side 'buy jobs and sell jobs on ebay..'

FFS

 

The other problem with price comparison sites if you have to pay to have your item you're trying to sell listed so often the cheapest price is not included. Richersounds used to be a good example of this before they turned into an overpriced Shungai DVD player merchant.

 

Normally you don't have to pay the price comparison sites for having a listing. They get referral (click through) commision if someone buys something having clicked through from the site. The sites usually go out and auto-scan all the relevant websites to pick up the prices. This is why there are so many of them as people reckon it's an easy way to make cash from a website as you just have to set it up, let it run and watch the cash roll in (you hope). Apart from the hosting costs it's virtually free to setup and run (assuming you write the price scanning software yourself).

Michael.

 

So it just uses some kind of webservice XML technology I assume?