The Test Begins: Do Google Shopping & Other Shopping Search Engines Give You The Best Deals?

It sounds pretty damning. Two recent surveys suggest that Google Shopping isn’t leading searchers to the best prices on products. But the surveys weren’t well documented, nor did they include competitors like Bing, Shopzilla, PriceGrabber and Nextag, which have similar issues. So, Search Engine Land will be running its own fully documented tests. Every few days, we’ll search for an item and show what we found, starting with today’s test, a search for a toaster.

How Much Is That Toaster In The Shopping Search Window?

This is a long story. It’s designed to be that way so that people can understand exactly what was tested and the reasoning for selecting prices to compare, which is lacking in the two other surveys. This type of details is important, especially when lobbing around accusations to the US Federal Trade Commission about potential consumer misleading, as Consumer Watchdog has done.

Take the time to read the full story if you want to understand just how very complicated it is to conduct a survey of this nature. But for those who want a quick summary now, the first test shows that Google actually ranked best in featuring a price that matched the lowest price that could be found from a major merchant:

The survey also found that all the shopping search engines have issues in terms of disclosing to consumers why they rank results in the way they do. Several have some serious issues with pricing inaccuracies.

Remember, a single test isn’t enough to draw a conclusion across the entire industry. I’m not sure that running six tests as the Financial Times did is enough, nor the 14 that Consumer Watchdog did is, either. But far more important, the how you test and what you count can produce skewing that can mess up even a large sample.

How Much Is That Toaster In The Shopping Search Window?

Why look for a toaster? That’s one of several items where Consumer Watchdog said its survey found a $20 price gap between what was listed on Google and what was listed as the lowest price for the same item at Shopzilla, PriceGrabber or Nextag, when it looked for “Cuisinart Classic 2P Slice Toaster.”

Bing wasn’t surveyed, even though it has shopping search ads exactly like Google. Nor did Consumer Watchdog explain the exact query was used or list a model number for the toaster. Nothing was documented. We were only given the end result, and when it comes to comparing shopping search engines, as you’ll see, it’s essential to show your work.

We can’t search for the exact same toaster as Consumer Watchdog did, because we don’t know the model. Plus, even if we did know it, looking for it might cause some to assume Google’s now “fixed” the toaster price problem for that particular model. So, for our test, we’re seeking a Hamilton Beach 2-Slice Metal Toaster, model 22504. Why? It’s one of the best selling toasters at Amazon, so it seems a popular model worth testing.

Which Price Do You Compare To?

At Google, the search began by entering “Hamilton Beach 2-Slice Metal Toaster” into the main search box. That brought back a special area of the search page with shopping search results, as the arrow points to below:

The results in the box are drawn from Google Shopping, which controversially shifted to an all-ad model last year. Only people who advertise are included in Google Shopping listings. The same is true of all the other shopping search engines in today’s test, by the way. Google isn’t some odd exception.

Already, you can see the challenge in deciding how to survey if the move to all-ads is causing lower prices not to be found. Which price in the results do you count? The $26.99 one from Sears, because it’s first? The $24.28 one from Walmart, because it’s lowest? The $34.99 one from JCPenney, because it’s highest? And are these even all the same model? One’s a different color than the others.

Consumer Watchdog’s survey method was to pick one result out of this box and compare it to the lowest price for a particular item that it could find on another shopping search engine, where it may have “drilled down” into the results in order to find that better price. Or perhaps it didn’t. The survey doesn’t make this clear.

The Financial Times, which did its own survey, instead compared prices listed within these results to what searchers might find at Google itself, if they know how to drill-down to get more listings. Again, which price from the results box was used isn’t clear, which matters when you can’t tell easily if you’re comparing the exact same product.

Four Searches To Verify The Lowest Price At Google

Our survey will use what we think is the cheapest price shown out of the results box for the same exact product, as best we can tell. We’ll also compare to what we’ll call the featured merchant price and finally to the best price from any well-known merchant listed.

To do all this, it’s time to “drill-down” into Google’s shopping results. We already did one initial search, and now we’ll do more in the hunt for the best price. The second search happens by clicking on that “Shop for Hamilton Beach….” link the arrow points to in the screenshot above. Doing that brings up this:

That click brought up a list of various items Google thinks matches the search, drawn from Google Shopping, and results that are still all ads. You just get more of them.

The first listing is for the model we’re after, and clicking on it made the result get larger, with Walmart as the featured merchant offering it at $24.28, before tax and shipping.

Why’s Walmart featured? No idea — nor does the typical consumer know why. It might be they’re paying more. It might be that Google’s complicated system of showing ads based on advertiser “quality score” means Walmart gets a bump. It’s not because Walmart has the cheapest price of the four merchants shown in that box, because in other searches, I know that sometimes the higher price merchant will still get featured.

You can drill-down further, by clicking on the “Compare prices from 50+ stories” link in the box. That constitutes a third search, and doing so brings up this list:

On that list, Walmart still has the lowest base price. But we’re still not being shown all the listings, only the first ten, ranked by whatever mystery criteria Google is using. If you want the lowest price, you have to effectively do a fourth search by clicking on the “Base Price” column heading, which resorts the listings like this:

If you do that, you’ll discover that a merchant called “Unopened Savings” is offering the low, low price of $12.27 for the toaster. But as this is an unrated merchant, a merchant with no recognizable brand, we’re not going to count that for this test. Instead, Walmart still hangs in there with the lowest price.

That’s also a lesson why it makes sense that Google doesn’t just rank merchants by lowest price or even highest customer ratings. Using only those criteria can easily allow extremes that don’t correspond to a good purchase experience to emerge. An unknown retailer offering a too-good-to-be-true price might indeed be too good to be true. A merchant with only a few reviews could easily get the highest customer ratings, based off just a tiny sample. It would be good if Google better explained more about how relevancy is determined for consumers who care, in an easy-to-find location, but the obmission also not abnormal in the shopping search space, either.

Google: Bottom Line, Lowest Price Is Shown

So what does the survey show?

• Lowest price in ad box: $24.28
• Lowest featured price in drill down: $24.28
• Lowest major brand price in drill down: $24.28

For this test, against its own listings, Google did perfect. But are there cheaper prices out there that competing search engines can find?

Bing: No Major Retailers Listed; No Lowest Price

Google’s biggest competitor is Bing. Here’s what you get for the same search there:

Just like Google, Bing only shows shopping results for those who pay, a change it made earlier this year, but without the controversy Google encountered. These ads appear in a box with a similar format to Google’s.

Unlike the search at Google, the results Bing displayed were terrible. None were for the model that we were after. Some aren’t even for the brand or for the specified two-slice capacity.

Changing to a search for “Hamilton Beach 22504″ to add the model number didn’t improve things much. The right toaster finally appeared, but apparently the only place it’s available is through eBay or a small merchant called Hayneedle, with the lowest price being $36.99:

Unlike with Google, there’s no way to “drill down” into Bing Shopping to search for a better price. That’s because Bing completely killed Bing Shopping earlier this year in favor of an all-ad format. What appears in that shopping ad box is all you get.

Of course, Bing would argue that it does provide “free” shopping results that allow for more inclusivity than Google’s model, through a system called “Rich Captions.” See that second arrow above, pointing to a Walmart listing? That’s Walmart appearing in Bing’s results — and for free — but using a system that displays the price of the toaster, $24.31 and in stock.

So, should that price be counted as Bing’s “low price” from its shopping results? Not if you’re trying to run a survey comparing Google’s shopping listings to Bing, as both Consumer Watchdog and the Financial Times did. That’s because they didn’t seem to use any pricing displayed through Google’s similar — and totally free — Rich Snippets system. Here’s an example of those from Google, for a search on ”Hamilton Beach 22504,” below:

See how complicated trying to compare shopping search engines can be? With Bing, if you did our original search, you didn’t get pricing either through the ad-block or via Rich Captions, unlike with Google. You certainly didn’t get what Bing promised when it killed its shopping search engine earlier this year, a better experience:

You no longer need to waste time navigating to a dedicated “shopping” experience to find what you’re looking for. Based on your intent, we’ll serve the best results.

You absolutely don’t get the ability to see all the shopping results, to determine if Bing is showing the best price from all those it knows about — which is crucial for measuring Bing against the same accusations that Google faces.

For the purposes of our test, we’re going with the Bing pricing shown in the ad block and tagging that as N/A, as there’s no major direct retailer showing it.

PriceGrabber: Low Prices That Don’t Exist

Over to PriceGrabber, the toaster is listed multiple times, with various prices. As with Google, the challenge is knowing which is the right model for the price comparison:

The first of the listings promising a price “as low as $17.99″ seems good, so let’s drill down by clicking on it:

Where’s that $17.99 price? Oddly, PriceGrabber shoves it way down at the bottom of the page, choosing to push consumers toward K-Mart’s $28.99 listing first. Why? As with Google, who knows. A consumer certainly doesn’t, just as they also probably don’t know that PriceGrabber is almost certainly is using the same all-ads model as Google. I can’t say for certain, because PriceGrabber seems to lack any definitive disclosure page for consumers.

Which price to use for our survey? We could go with the Target price of $17.99, but there’s one problem with that. It doesn’t really exist:

Clicking on the offer opens PriceGrabber up to potential accusations of bait-and-switch, since the price Target is really selling the toaster for is $24.49. Amazon, which has the next lowest price of $19.99, turns out to really be selling it for $24.28. That’s cheaper than the third lowest price from PriceGrabber, Walmart at $24.31. But since PriceGrabber isn’t actually listing the correct Amazon price, for purposes of our survey, we’ll use the lowest correct price it actually shows: Walmart’s, and at the $24.28 actually shown when you go to Walmart’s site. As for the “featured price,” that would be the first price on the original list, Kmart at $28.99.

Nextag: Pushing Higher-Priced Amazon Listing Over Lower-Priced One

Searching for “Hamilton Beach 2-Slice Metal Toaster” at Nextag proved to be difficult. Well, impossible. No matter what I did, that search just generated no results. In the end, I resorted to a search for “Hamilton Beach 22504,” which came back with this:

As with Google — and PriceGrabber — the lowest price isn’t shown first. Instead, sorting is done by “Best Match” order, whatever that is. Nothing on the page explains it. The help page, if consumers go to it, has no help about it — though at least it discloses that Nextag gets paid by merchants to list them, just as Google does.

Changing the sort to lowest price brings this up:

Now we discover that the lowest price from a major retailer, according to Nextag, is Amazon for $23.77, not from Amazon for $29.99, as it first presented. Except, as it turns out, that $23.77 price doesn’t exist. Going to the offer finds the price is really $24.28 — which matches another Amazon listing that Nextag also shows.

For the survey, the low price will be $24.28, while the featured price will be $29.99 — both prices coming from Amazon, which yes, lists the identical product at two differentprice points.

Shopzilla: Inaccurate Prices Shown

At Shopzilla, “Hamilton Beach 2-Slice Metal Toaster” didn’t find the model we were after, so I did a search for “Hamilton Beach 22504,” which returned this list:

The model appears to be listed three times. If you were to click on any of these listings using the “go to store” link, rather than the small “Compare price at other stores,” you’d pay anywhere between $31.90 to $43.33 for the item. Walmart is listed first at $43.33.

Using Consumer Watchdog’s survey methodology, that’s the assumption of what most consumers would do — click on those links and not try to find better pricing. But let’s try the drill-down. Selecting the first of the listing brought up a page with prices from a variety of merchants:

As with Google, PriceGrabber and Nextag, prices aren’t shown in order of lowest-to-highest. Instead, the now familiar “Best Match” sort order is used. There’s no help page that explains what this means, just as there’s no help page providing any disclosure that all these listings are almost certainly ads.

The “Best Match” sort order means Target, with the lowest price of any major retailer at $17.99, is buried way down on the list. Instead, consumers are pointed first at a Sears offer to buy the toaster for $25.64.

Except that Target low price? It’s really $24.99. And that Sears offer? It’s actually$26.99:

As it turns out, the lowest price from a major retailer is from Walmart, at $24.32 – which actually turns out to be $24.28, when you go to the page.

Wait — wasn’t Walmart the first listing way back on Shopzilla, offering the toaster for $43.33? Yes, it was. Walmart has a one page where it oddly sells the same item for two different prices, cheaper if you buy from it directly and more expensive if you buy through a partner:

For the purposes of our survey, we’re considering the featured price on Shopzilla to be the first price you get when you drill-down into the listings, that from Sears, at $26.99 that’s accurately shown in the landing page. The low price is Walmart at $24.28. Counting the Walmart featured listing before doing the drill-down is difficult, because it isn’t accurately showing the actual price.

The Big Wrap-Up: They All Kind Of Suck

As I said at the outset, we’ll run a few more tests like this. I have no doubt that Google, which came out the best in this one, may not do so well in another. But the bigger issue to me is that the entire state of shopping search feels like a big mess.

It’s pretty clear that there’s not a lot of consumer disclosure going on by anyone. That’s despite the fact that I called the FTC’s attention to this issue last year:

• A Letter To The FTC Regarding Search Engine Disclosure Compliance

The FTC’s response was that of what I’ve come to expect from an agency that seems ill-prepared and equipped to understand the complicated search engine space. It did nothing more than encourage search engines to pretty-please disclose ads more:

• FTC Updates Search Engine Ad Disclosure Guidelines After “Decline In Compliance”

Ironically, Google is coming under fresh fire for not disclosing enough when it seems to do far more than some of the shopping search engines that it’s competing with.

The mess of shopping search also, in my view, weakens the argument that Google somehow would be better if it was pointing people to competing shopping search engines even more. Given that several clearly have issues showing fresh, valid prices, that’s just going to jump consumers through even more hoops and frustration.

Rather, it would be good to see them all step-up efforts to improve relevancy in a space that feels largely forgotten, in terms of improving search relevancy. I’m an expert on search engines, and trying to ferret out what these shopping search engines are showing, and how to use them to double-check to get the best price, is exhausting. I feel sorry for the consumer relying on them for that purpose.

Hummingbird's Unsung Impact on Local Search

There seems to have been a significant qualitative shift in local results since Google's release of Hummingbird that I haven't seen reported on search engine blogs and media outlets. The columns I have seen have generally espoused advice to take advantage of what Hummingbird was designed to do rather than looked at the outcome of the update.

From where I sit, the outcome has been a slightly lower overall quality in Google's local results, possibly due in part to a "purer" ranking algorithm in local packs. While these kinds of egregious results reported soon after Hummingbird's release have mostly disappeared, it's the secondary Hummingbird flutter, which may have coincided with the November 14th "update," that seems to have caused the most noticeable changes.

The manual searches for five keywords, both geo-modified and generic, in five diverse markets around the country has been performed. I selected these keywords based on terms that I knew Google considered to have "local intent" across as broad a range of industries as I could think of. After performing the searches, I took note of the top position and number of occurrences of four types of sites, as well as position and number of results in each "pack."

Keywords	Markets	Result Type Taxonomy
personal injury lawyer	Chicago	national directory (e.g., Yelp)
assisted living facility	Portland	regional directory (e.g., ArizonaGolf.com)
wedding photographer	Tampa	local business website (e.g., AcmeElectric.com)
electrician	Burlington	barnacle webpage (e.g., facebook.com/acmeelectric)
pet store	Flagstaff	national brand (e.g., Petsmart.com)

Again, a very simple analysis that is by no means intended to be a statistically significant study.

I'll share with you some interim takeaways that I found interesting.

1. Search results in search results have made a comeback in a big way

If anything, Hummingbird or the November 14th update seem to have accelerated the trend that started with the Venice update: more and more localized organic results for generic (un-geo-modified) keywords.

But the winners of this update haven't necessarily been small businesses. Google is now returning specific metro-level pages from national directories like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Findlaw, and others for these generic keywords.

This trend is even more pronounced for keywords that do include geo-modifiers, as the example below for "pet store portland" demonstrates.

Results like the one above call into question Google's longstanding practice of minimizing the frequency with which these pages occur in Google search results. While the Yelp example above is one of the more blatant instances that I came across, plenty of directories (including WeddingWire, below) are benefitting from similar algorithmic behavior. In many cases the pages that are ranking are content-thin directory pages—the kind of content to which Panda, and to some extent Penguin, were supposed to minimize visibility.

Overall, national directories were the most frequently-occurring type of organic result for the phrases I looked at—a performance amplified when considering geo-modified keywords alone.

National brands as a result type is underrepresented due to 'personal injury lawyer,' 'electrician,' and 'wedding photographer' keyword choices. For the keywords where there are relevant national brands ('assisted living facility' and 'pet store'), they performed quite well.

2. Well-optimized regional-vertical directories accompanied by content still perform well

While a number of thriving directories were wiped out by the initial Panda update, here's an area where the Penguin and Hummingbird updates have been effective. There are plenty of examples of high-quality regionally focused content rewarded with a first-page position—in some cases above the fold. I don't remember seeing as many of these kinds of sites over the last 18 months as I do now.

Especially if keywords these sites are targeting return carousels instead of packs, there's still plenty of opportunity to rank: in my limited sample, an average of 2.3 first-page results below carousels were for regional directory-style sites.

3. There's little-to-no blending going on in local search anymore

While Mike Blumenthal and Darren Shaw have theorized that the organic algorithm still carries weight in terms of ranking Place results, visually, authorship has been separated from place in post-Hummingbird SERPs.

Numerous "lucky" small businesses (read: well-optimized small businesses) earned both organic and map results across all industries and geographies I looked at.

4. When it comes to packs, position 4 is the new 1

The overwhelming majority of packs seem to be displaying in position 4 these days, especially for "generic" local intent searches. Geo-modified searches seem slightly more likely to show packs in position #1, which makes sense since the local intent is explicitly stronger for those searches.

Together with point #3 in this post, this is yet another factor that is helping national and regional directories compete in local results where they couldn't before—additional spots appear to have opened up above the fold, with authorship-enabled small business sites typically shown below rather than above or inside the pack. 82% of the searches in my little mini-experiment returned a national directory in the top three organic results.

5. The number of pack results seems now more dependent on industry than geography

This is REALLY hypothetical, but prior to this summer, the number of Place-related results on a page (whether blended or in packs) seemed to depend largely on the quality of Google's structured local business data in a given geographic area. The more Place-related signals Google had about businesses in a given region, and the more confidence Google had in those signals, the more local results they'd show on a page. In smaller metro areas for example, it was commonplace to find 2- and 3-packs across a wide range of industries.

At least from this admittedly small sample size, Google increasingly seems to be a show a consistent number of pack results by industry, regardless of the size of the market.

Keyword	# in Pack	Reason for Variance
assisted living facility	6.9	6-pack in Burlington
electrician	6.9	6-pack in Portland
personal injury lawyer	6.4	Authoritative OneBox / Bug in Chicago
pet store	3.0
wedding photographer	7.0

This change may have more to do with the advent of the carousel than with Hummingbird, however. Since the ranking of carousel results doesn't reliably differ from that of (former) packs, it stands to reason that visual display ofall local results might now be controlled by a single back-end mechanism.

6. Small businesses are still missing a big opportunity with basic geographic keyword optimization

This is more of an observational bullet point than the others. While there were plenty of localized organic results featuring small business websites, these tended to rank lower than well-optimized national directories (like Yelp, Angie's List, Yellowpages.com, and others) for small-market geo-modified phrases (such as "electrician burlington").

For non-competitive phrases like this, even a simple website with no incoming links of note can rank on the first page (#7) just by including "Burlington, VT" in its homepage Title Tag. With just a little TLC—maybe a link to a contact page that says "contact our Burlington electricians"—sites like this one might be able to displace those national directories in positions 1-2-3.

7. The Barnacle SEO strategy is underutilized in a lot of industries

Look at the number of times Facebook and Yelp show up in last year's citation study . Clearly these are major "fixed objects" to which small businesses should be attaching their exoskeletons.

Yet 74% of searches I conducted as part of this experiment returned no Barnacle results.

This result for "pet store chicago" is one of the few barnacles that I came across—and it's a darn good result! Not only is Liz (unintenionally?) leveraging the power of the Yelp domain, but she gets five schema'd stars right on the main Google SERP—which has to increase her clickthrough rate relative to her neighbors.

Interestingly, the club industry is one outlier where small businesses are making the most of power profiles. This might have been my favorite result—the surprisingly competitive "dance club flagstaff" where Jax is absolutely crushing it on Facebook despite no presence in the carousel.

What does all this mean?

I have to admit, I don't really know the answer to this question yet. Why would Google downgrade the visibility of its Place-related results just as the quality of its Places backend has finally come up to par in the last year? Why favor search-results-in-local-search-results, something Google has actively and successfully fought to keep out of other types of searches for ages? Why minimize the impact of authorship profiles just as they are starting to gain widespread adoption by small business owners and webmasters?

One possible reason might be in preparation for more card-style layouts on mobile phones and wearable technology. But why force these (I believe slightly inferior) results on users of desktop computers, and so far in advance of when cards will be the norm?

At any rate, here are five takeaways from my qualitative review of local results in the last couple of months.

1. Reports of directories' demise have been greatly exaggerated. For whatever reason (?), Google seems to be giving directories a renewed lease on life. With packs overwhelmingly in the fourth position, they can now compete for above-the-fold visibility in positions 1-2-3, especially in smaller and mid-size metro areas.
2. Less-successful horizontal directories (non-Yelps and TripAdvisors, e.g.) should consider the economics of their situation. Their ship has largely sailed in larger metro areas like Chicago and Portland. But they still have the opportunity to dominate smaller markets. I realize you probably can't charge a personal injury lawyer in Burlington what you charge his colleague in downtown Chicago. But, in terms of the lifetime value of who willactually get business from your advertising packages, the happy Burlington attorney probably exceeds the furious one from Chicago (if she is even able to stay in business through the end of her contract with you).
3. The Barnacle opportunity is huge, for independent and national businesses alike. With Google's new weighting towards directories in organic results and the unblending of packs, barnacle listings present an opportunity for savvy businesses to earn three first-page positions for the same keyword—one pack listing, one web listing, and one (or more) barnacle listing

Well, that's my take on what's happening in local search these days. Do you think the quality of local results has improved or declined since Hummingbird? Have you perceived a shift since November 14th?

Google Glass Not Welcome in Seattle Diner

A Seattle diner has banned its customers from wearing Google Glass, as one visitor found out the hard way.

Nick Starr is a network engineer from Seattle who visited the Lost Lake diner in his hometown while wearing Google's augmented reality spectacles. According to Starr, he had eaten at the restaurant several times while wearing Google Glass headgear, but on his last visit was asked to remove it or leave.

Starr shared his experience on Facebook, writing:

"We begin looking at the menu and a woman who works there comes up to us and tells me that the owner's other restaurant doesn't allow Google Glass and that I would have to either put it away (it doesn't fold up btw) or leave.

"I inform her that I am well aware of the policy at The 5 Point Cafe (a diner under the same ownership that bans Google Glass) but asked to see where it was policy for Glass to be disallowed at Lost Lake. She said she couldn't provide any and when asked to speak with management she stated she was the night manager. I again inform her that the two venues are different and have different policies. She refuses and I leave."

The restaurant told a different story however, and wrote on its Facebook page that a "rude" customer had left because he didn't want to remove his Glass headset:

Image from Lost Lake diner Facebook page

Google Glass isn't available for consumers yet, but at the rate it is going, there will be nowhere to wear it when it is released.

Las Vegas casinos have already announced their intention to ban Google Glass eyewear.

Apple Buys Topsy, A Leading Twitter Search & Analytics Company

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple has purchased Topsy, one of the leading Twitter search and analytics companies, for more than $200 million.

The WSJ report says that Apple has confirmed the deal but wouldn’t comment more beyond this statement:

Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.

Topsy is about the only decent third-party Twitter search service to have survived, in recent years.

Google had a wonderful service for finding Twitter content called Google Realtime Search that died in 2011, when Google & Twitter failed to renew a deal.

Bing Social, which uses data from Twitter due to an on-going deal with Microsoft and Twitter, isn’t very robust. I’m not sure Bing even remembers the service is still running. Bing, instead, has focused on integrating social results into its main search results.

That’s left little Topsy as the lone survivor. Indeed, Topsy’s access to Twitter’s “firehose” of tweets and focus on providing search results and analytical tools make it even more robust than Twitter’s own Twitter Search, for some queries. In September, it expanded its index to cover every tweet since Twitter began, as our story covers below:

• Topsy Becomes Definitive Twitter Search Engine

It’s unclear what happens to Topsy now. Will Apple allow it to continue as a standalone service? Will Apple, which recently baked Twitter Search into iOS 7, replace that with Topsy? Will Twitter want to continue giving Topsy what’s likely been a sweetheart deal for firehose access to its data, now that it’s owned by Apple?

Yahoo’s Year In Review Includes Top Searches For 2013 & First Ever Posting Of Top Tumblr Trends

Yahoo has assembled an impressive list of search trends for 2013, covering 38 different “Top Searched” lists on everything from top searches overall to top searched cookies (yes, the ones you eat). For the first time ever, Yahoo included top trends on Tumblr in its year in review, highlighting the most viral blogs on Tumblr, along with new and notable blogs, and the top ten Tumblr fashion trends.

Last year, Yahoo says the election season greatly impacted its top searches, but the most popular searches for 2013 revolved around celebrities like Miley Cyrus, Kim Kardashian, Kate Upton and Selena Gomez. The only government related search in the top ten overall top searches for 2013 was “Obamacare”, winning the No. 6 spot.

Top Searches on Yahoo in 2013:

1. miley cyrus
2. kim kardashian
3. kate upton
4. minecraft
5. selena gomez
6. obamacare (affordable care act)
7. amanda bynes
8. jodi arias
9. iphone 5
10. justin bieber

Making its first ever appearance, Tumblr’s top trends were a new addition to Yahoo’s year in review. The Official White House Tumblr ranked No. 1 for top ten new and notable blogs, followed by the Daily Bugle and Menswear Dog. The top 10 fashion trends on Tumbler included Hipster, Grunge, Indie, Pale and Swag. Greg Pembroke’sReasons My Son Is Crying was the most viral blog on Tumblr this year.

Top Ten Most Viral Blogs on Tumblr in 2013:

1. Reasons My Son Is Crying
2. This Charming Charlie
3. Hot-Dog Legs
4. Things Fitting Perfectly Into Other Things
5. The Worst Room
6. Brides Throwing Cats
7. Emojinal Art Gallery
8. Exploding Actresses
9. Yacht Cats
10. Buzzfeed Articles Without the GIFs

For anyone curious about the most popular who, what, when, why and how questions asked on Yahoo, the site pulled the top ten searches for each category. Here’s a quick list of each category’s No. 1 question:

• Top Who Question: “who wins the bachelor”
• Top What Question: “what is twerking”
• Top When Question: “when is thanksgiving”
• Top Why Question: “why only 6 jurors in zimmerman trial”
• Top How Question: “how to take a screenshot”

George Zimmerman also appeared in the top searched news stories on Yahoo, taking the No. 5 spot after Jodi Arias trial, Obamacare, Boston Marathon bombing and Royal baby birth.

Top Searched News Stories on Yahoo in 2013:

1. jodi arias trial
2. obamacare (affordable care act)
3. boston marathon bombing
4. royal baby birth
5. george zimmerman trial
6. syria civil war
7. north korea missile threats
8. papal transition
9. paula deen lawsuit
10. aaron hernandez shooting

The top three sports teams searched on Yahoo in 2013 included the Dallas Cowboys, Boston Red Sox, and Green Bay Packers. Women ruled the list for most searched athletes, earning six of the ten spots.

Top Searched Athletes on Yahoo in 2013:

1. Tim Tebow
2. Tiger Woods
3. Danica Patrick
4. Lindsey Vonn
5. Ronda Rousey
6. Lamar Odom
7. Tito Ortiz
8. Serena Williams
9. Maria Sharapova
10. Gina Carano

For entertainment searches, Star Trek Into the Darkness was the most searched movie on Yahoo, followed by Iron Man 3 and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. American Idolwas the top searched reality TV show, while Walking Dead took the No. 1 spot for top searched TV drama in 2013. The top searched female celebrity was Miley Cyrus, and the top searched male celebrity was Justin Bieber.

For top obsessions of 2013, a category Yahoo defined as “top searched” plus “top gainers”, Duck Dynasty, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead/zombie apocalypse topped the list. Other 2013 “top obsessions” included twerking, snapchat and selfie.

And the No. 1 cookie searched on Yahoo in 2013? Chocolate chip, of course.

The Searcher’s Guide To Black Friday, Cyber Monday & Holiday Shopping

This year, U.S. shoppers now have more opportunities than ever to join the throngs scrambling to secure holiday bargains, thanks to many brick and mortar stores opening ever earlier and staying open ever longer. Black Friday, the traditional post-Thanksgiving sales lollapalooza, has become a 24-hour slog for many retailers. And some retailers, impatient to lure shoppers, have now succumbed to selling on “gray Thursday,” opening their stores on Thanksgiving day itself. With good reason: sales rung up over the Thanksgiving day holiday account for as much as 5% of annual revenues for many retailers.

And then there’s cyber Monday, where online retailers entice shoppers who aren’t tapped out or exhausted from splurging at the mall over the holiday weekend. Increasingly, the lines between Black Friday and Cyber Monday are blurring, according to recent research from Nielsen. They found that 51% of consumers would be shopping online on Black Friday, with 46% shopping on Cyber Monday.

So how do you find the best deals online? Search, naturally. While Google and Bing are quite good at detecting “commercial intent” in queries and will quite often provide you with attractive shopping options in standard search results, there are also more specialized shopping search services that will likely give you better results. Here’s a look at the major players in shopping search, starting with the two search juggernauts.

Shopping With Google & Bing

Both Google and Bing have had shopping search options for ages. But both introduced big changes over the past couple of years that changed the experience for shoppers, and in many cases ended up costing merchants who previously could get products listed without charge.

In 2012, Google announced that Google Product Search would be getting a new name,Google Shopping. It also made the unprecedented move of doing away with free listings for merchants.

Then in August 2013 Bing followed suit, replacing Bing Shopping with Bing Product Search, which simply integrates product results within Bing search results rather than in a separate destination. Unlike Google, Bing also continues to offer both paid and free ways for merchants to have product listings.

More on Google and Bing shopping options, including Bing’s “Scroogled” attack campaign on Google:

• Microsoft: Bing Shopping & Cashback
• Google: Product Search
• Bing Attacks Google Shopping With “Scroogled” Campaign, Forgets It’s Guilty Of Same Problems

Shopping Search: The Major Players

This holiday season, you’ll get decent shopping results from both Google and Bing. But if you’re serious about getting the best bargains or finding the widest selection of products, you should check out specialized shopping search engines.

Shopping search engines, or perhaps more properly, product and price comparison services, were one of the first specialized “vertical” search types to emerge in the early days of the web. As with web search, there used to be many players, but today there are just a handful remaining that have broad enough scope to be really useful for most shoppers.

Shopzilla. Like Google, Shopzilla is both a longtime veteran and also offers a broad array of choices for searchers. Shopzilla began life as Bizrate in 1997 and morphed into Shopzilla in 2004. Today the company operates a number of comparison services, showcasing over 100 million products from tens of thousands of retailers from sites it operates including Bizrate, Beso, Shopzilla, Retrevo, TaDa, PrixMoinsCher andSparDeinGeld.

Merchants interesting in listing on Shopzilla should check out the Merchant Listings & Advertising page.

Nextag. Another longtime veteran of the comparison shopping space, Nextag goes beyond product search, helping you find deals on event tickets, travel, and Groupon-like flash deals. If you’re curious about what other people are finding interesting, check out Radar which provides an up-to-date snapshot of what others are searching for and buying.

Since Nextag Nextag offers multiple products and services in results check out theAdvertise With Us page to learn more about how you can list products, events or travel services.

Pricegrabber likes to brand itself as “the” top-tier comparison service, stating “our site attracts computer literate, informed buyers, in search of the best deal they can find.” True – but as a searcher, be aware that the site is owned and operated by Experian, the credit reporting company that also owns Hitwise, an online traffic analysis group. Bottom-line: You’re likely to get really good search results from Pricegrabber, but you’ll also find a significant degree of targeting due to the sheer amount of data Experian has gathered, both in aggregate and potentially about your web use in general. If you’re concerned about privacy you may want to use the other services described here.

Merchants interesting in listing on Pricegrabber should check out the Experian Site Mappage to view all of the varied products and solutions the company offers.

There are a few other shopping comparison sites, including eBay’s Shopping.com,Become, Pronto, and others, but start with these – and happy holiday shopping!