New Database Research to Improve Comparison Shopping

http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/001897.html: "Many of us depend on comparison shopping on the web for a diversity of things, flight tickets and computers included, and there are a number of agents available to help us out. But often it takes a lot of time just to manipulate these services to actually include products that you know are out there. The databases involved aren't considering your queries as any human travel agent would. Web agents aren't involved in evaluations or intelligent guesses.

This is how it works; users are provided with pricing information for thousands of products. Data is reconciled from dozens of online retailers who may represent products in slightly different ways. Due to those slight differences, until now, it has been tough for comparison-shopping software to properly figure out whether it is describing the same product or different ones."