Shopping for the right search …

I’ve been casting around for the ultimate search engine, especially when it comes to shopping.

Google is great, as far as it goes. But Froogle really doesn’t do it for me as a shopping search. It’s too “kill ’em all and sort ’em out” in its approach. This weekend, I stumbled across something with a lot of potential.

Become.com just launched and it’s still in Beta, but it’s showing a lot of potential. In addition to doing some interesting things with the basic algorithms that make searching more productive, they’re doing something that strikes me as a little retro. They’re using human editors to identify sites that are particularly useful. That’s a throwback to Yahoo’s early days, when much of its directory approach was hands-on and it tended to focus on stuff that was worth checking out, not just everything that happens to be out there. There’s a big difference.

The results tend to be a lot more useful, at least as far as I’m concerned. When I search for “luggage,” for instance, Become quickly took me to a several sites with great advice on buying luggage. Consumer advocacy needs to play a bigger role in shopping search. Don’t just tell me everything that’s available: Help me make the right choice. Help me cut through all the noise and find what matters.

The guys behind this developed — and then sold — MySimon, another shopping-focused search. I never really like Simon, though, because I always had the creeping feeling that I wasn’t necessarily getting the best prices/products; I was being steered toward products by the site’s sponsors. Become.com seems to avoid that. So far …