Wajam Partners With Shopping.com To Add Comparison Shopping To Its Social Search Engine

Wajam, one of the most promising players in social search besides Google and Microsoft, today announced that it is partnering with Shopping.com to add comparison shopping to its social search results. With this, the browser plugin now goes beyond just showing you relevant social media posts from your friends when you use one the major search engines and look at sites like Yelp, YouTube, Tripadvisor, Amazon and eBay. Once installed, this update will show alternative shopping destinations and their prices right next to your friends opinions about a product when you shop online.

The Montreal-based company indexes all the public tweets and status updates from your friends on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Wajam then uses its proprietary algorithms to rank this data and displays it next to your regular search results whenever you search on a supported site. With today’s update, the company now also lets users comparison shop right from every supported site.

This, says Wajam founder and CEO Martin-Luc Archambault, means you can now “tap into to your friends wherever you conduct a search, and now you can take your friends shopping whenever you shop online. Gaining insights to what your friends’ experience with a product is before you make your purchase can be extremely beneficial.” The shopping feature can also be minimized, snoozed and deactivated when it is not needed.

This partnership, of course, also means Wajam is now monetizing its service through affiliate links to Shopping.com. This, Wajam’s Alain Wong tells me, provides a “glimpse of the potential future of social advertising.” He also told me that the company, which hasn’t taken any outside funding yet, is growing fast. Wajam currently has 20 employees and it in the process of hiring more developers, data scientists and quantitative analysts.