Transparensee Search Technology Applied to Shopping

Steve Lavine, the CEO of Transparnsee, is in town this week and I had a chance to talk with him for an hour or so this afternoon. During that chat, he gave me the green light to show off something I'd seen a few weeks ago when it was still in development. John Battelle has written about an overview of their discovery engine and later technology demonstration using digital camera product data from a popular technology publisher. The goal was to build an interactive shopping aid that lets you explore the universe of a cameras using whatever attributes you like to slice the data: price, resolution, editor's ratings, size, etc. When he talked me thru the demo on the phone, I was very impressed. The site worked the way I wanted it do. The last few times I've shopped for a digital camera, I knew the key featues I wanted and had to jump thru many hoops to figure out what the landscape looks like. all the 5.0-5.9 megapixel cameras that have firewire (all the controls. That makes it an interesting mix of searching and browsing. It's like having an intelligent guide by your side at a large electronics store. You still get the ability to drill down quickly but that doesn't completely shut you out of looking at what's nearby on the shelves. Anyway, I can't do the demo justice just by writing about it. (Yeah, I know I said something like that last time I wrote about Transparensee.) Go look there for digital cameras, you can drill into various buckets like "Reader Comments... Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Yahoo! Search blog as well. Visit Jeremy's blog: