Shopping search engine TheFind is debuting a more personalized search feature today. Personalized search sifts through the millions of online products available to give you personal results based on a combination of both your Facebook “Likes” and past shopping searches and clicks on TheFind.com.
TheFind, which launched back in 2006, is a comparison shopping site that surface and categorize more than 500 million product offers from 500,000 stores. The company was recently granted a patent (the seventh in TheFind’s portfolio of patents) for the “Method for Relevancy Ranking of Products in Online Shopping,” and as the company’s CTO Shashikant Khandelwal explains, TheFind wants to rank products based on your social and shopping habits to give you exactly what you want faster.
For people who sign in with Facebook Connect, personalization of your results is based both on your demographics (gender, age etc) and your Facebook Likes and also activity on TheFind. Obviously, the more active you are on TheFind and Facebook, the more tailored the search results will become. So if you are searching for jeans, you’ll see the stores that your friends liked and results from those stores will rank higher than others.
This isn’t the first time TheFind has attempted to incorporate social data into the shopping experience. Back in 2010, TheFind debuted Facebook Connect, and last year debuted Glimpse, a Pinterest-like Facebook shopping discovery app. Now TheFind is hoping adding social to the search experience will help conversions. Another startup playing in the similar space is Lish, the new social shopping app from Payvment.
