it is all about shopping..

when required to search something, I would go for Google first. I am not sure why, nevertheless my IE homepage is set to Yahoo.com

That is a bit funny I know. Probably due to the fact that Yahoo.com is one of the fastest loading page in the world. I seldom tried MSN search and others as well.

I would like to highlight to you that there is another emerging force eager to be part of the Internet search engine industry; become.com

This is a site co-developed by two Korean who during the dot-com era, had a great success and made millions. During 2000, before the dot-com crash, their company mySimon; online shopping aids, which allows consumer to do comparison shopping. It was built around a virtual learning agent designed by Yun to extract prices, product details, and other relevant data from merchants' online catalogues, each of which was structured different. That was those days, when there is no XML around. mySimon reaped $700 million from CNET acquisition, they become rich people.

Now, they are back in action again. Taking aim at Google's lucrative advertisement revenue.

Become.com is a specialized search engine, mainly for shopper as well. Its intention is to create a pure search which helps user to get to results which focus on shopping and nothing else. One thing is good for sure, it filters out many porn-site, unlike Google.

The core of become.com is its AIR algorithm; affinity index ranking, it differs from Google’s PageRank algorithm in two ways. First, when AIR assesses the importance of a given Web page, it takes into account the topics of the pages linking to it.(PageRank considers some elements of the context surrounding an incoming link, but not the page’s overall topic.) AIR rewards pages that have on-topic incoming links. Second, AIR penalizes pages that have outgoing links to off-topic pages (PageRank does not examine a page’s outgoing links.) AIR’s dual process of rewarding and punishing pages based on the primacy of a specific topic means that the top search results for a query like refrigerators will be those closely related to buying a refrigerator, not necessary those with most incoming links, as with PageRank.

Besides that, they also includes human element into the search result by having a small team of people responsible to 'crawl' the Internet for legitimate web site which proves to be important for shoppers, such as consumersearch.com Such site would never ever appear on the top of dynamic search engine result if not for explicit intervention because of its lacking of popularity.

Google's PageRank and Become's AIR approach, besides its technicality, do have other differences; culture. It is clearly a western and eastern mentality.

based on an article from Technology review, may 2005.