The team, led by researcher Bruce Krulwich, created BargainFinder in 1995 as an experiment and published it on-line without advance warning to the e-commerce sites being compared.
NexTag another entry into comparison shopping was named Times magazine world top 50 website in 2008,[2] only to eventually close in 2018.
[3] In 2005, PriceGrabber was acquired by Experian for $485 million, negotiated by then-CEO and founder of the company, Kamran Pourzanjani, along with Tamim Mourad, in 1999.
[citation needed] It started in 2010 with CompareXpress in Singapore, and in the following years companies like Baoxian (China), Jirnexu (Malaysia), and AskHanuman (Thailand) followed.
[7] The European Commission began an investigation in 2010, which concluded in July 2017 with a €2.42 billion fine against the parent company Alphabet, and an order to change its practices within 90 days.
Streetprices, founded in 1997, has been a very early company in this space; it invented price graphs and email alerts in 1998.
Some third party businesses are providing consolidation of data feeds so that comparison sites do not have to import from many different merchants.
Affiliate networks aggregate data feeds from many merchants and provide them to the price comparison sites.
This enables price comparison sites to monetize the products contained in the feeds by earning commissions on click through traffic.
[citation needed] Other price comparison sites have deals with merchants and aggregate feeds using their own technology.
Empirical projects that assessed the functionality and performance of page-wise SSC engines (AKA bots) exist.
Comparison shopping sites obtain large product data feeds covering many different retailers from affiliate networks such as LinkShare and Commission Junction.
The table style layout of a comparison website could be considered by Google as "Autogenerated Content and Roundup/Comparison Type of Pages".
[16] This technology includes software and plugins aimed to standardize the typical processes involving price and product comparison.
[19] When a big German newspaper published a report about such a website[20] and consumer protection organization sending out warning letters,[20] observers started to note a sense of panic in the industry, with site owners changing or deleting the content in question.
[22] In 2017, the European Commission fined Google €2.42BN for allegedly monopolising the comparison shopping engine (CSE) market.