By Leslie Walker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 22, 1998; Page H1

Many Internet sites claim to help consumers find the best deals online, either by linking to low prices or comparing product features. The idea is simple: Type in the product name and the search engine spits out reviews and prices.

Some can be invaluable, especially the bargain book finders such as Acses and Bibliofind. Type in the title or author's name and these sites find obscure, out-of-print used books for sale.

But most comparison-shopping technology is so new and crude that it rarely works as advertised. The sites link to the wrong products, or to little-known merchants that may have been in business for all of two weeks.

The technology is in tremendous flux, with two kinds emerging. One focuses on price and is aimed at shoppers who already know what they want. The other tries to help consumers learn more about products so they can make a choice.

Many first-generation shopping agents compared prices among competing cyber-stores when they hit the World Wide Web last year. But retailers chafed under the pricing pressure, and some blocked the "bots" – geekspeak for software robots – from rooting through their sites.

A half-dozen bots were soon bought by big Internet companies, such as Amazon.com (Junglee), Excite (Jango), America Online (PersonaLogic) and Inktomi (C2B Technologies). For the most part, these agents are being retrained to compare information only within their new owners' inventory or that of partners.

Other technology innovators remain independent, their bots scouring the Web. MySimon, for example, licenses its price-comparison agent to other Web sites, searching the inventories of more than 850 Web merchants in 90 different categories. Bottom Dollar also invites consumers to "search the Web for the best price."

There are some ambitious editorial guides, such as the free Consumers Digest site. One that doesn't focus on price is CompareNet. Its staff of 25 writers and editors tries to help consumers research products in depth.

"Say you wanted to buy a television set," said Trevor Traina, president and co-founder of CompareNet Inc. "We give you our editorial material explaining the latest trends in TVs and home theater systems.

"Then we give you different ways you can continue. You can search our database of every TV by price and feature. You can search by brand if, say, you just want to look at the Sonys. You can also search by model number or even ... compare two models side by side."

Because it takes time and money to train intelligent software agents, some of the more helpful shopping engines are limited to a single category. In addition to books, computers and electronics have attracted some good ones, including the guides from Cnet.com and ZDnet.

But don't get too attached to any of these sites.

What happened at Yahoo is typical of the technology free-for-all on the Web. After launching a pioneering price-comparison robot barely a year ago, Yahoo is already planning on putting it in mothballs.

Yahoo's first guide, sponsored by Visa, was powered by technology that has since been purchased by Amazon.com. The guide is still linked in tiny type from the bottom of Yahoo's home page, but it won't be there for long because Yahoo already launched a new guide last week.