Cazoodle Makes it Easy to Find Stuff on the Web; Unveils Its Shopping Search at DEMOfall 09

SAN DIEGO, Sept. 22 /PRNewswire/ – Shoppers no longer need to visit so many websites to find the electronics of their dreams. Cazoodle Shopping Search is the first and only organic shopping search service that simultaneously provides comprehensive as well as precise product information. The first launch is for consumer electronic products including laptop and desktop computer, digital camera and camcorder, printer, television, mp3 player, etc.

While many shopping search services exist already, Cazoodle Shopping Search provides far more results. For “canon sd1200″ query, Cazoodle returns 610 offers compared to 33 offers at Shopping.com. The results are accurately organized into groups of competing offers for the same product from different merchants. “Most existing services, including Shopping.com, Price Grabber, Nextag, and Google Products, rely on vendor-submitted feeds and are, thus, inherently limited in their coverage,” said Prof. Kevin Chang, President and founder of Cazoodle.

Cazoodle uses the large scale data integration technology, developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, to organize the real world data in both the surface Web and the deep Web. The intelligent agent crawling technology can easily crawl, extract, and integrate the data from thousands of web sources, e.g., product title, reviews, image, price, processor speed, hard drive capacity, memory size, etc. from a laptop page on a retail website.

At DEMO, Cazoodle is also launching Shopping Caddy, a Firefox plug-in. Govind Kabra, CTO of Cazoodle says, “Just like Caddy in Golf — Shopping Caddy goes with you wherever you shop.” When you are shopping online, say, at Amazon.com, Caddy can detect what product you are looking at; with a mouse-click, you can find the offers for that product from all the other vendors online. The caddy also shows the price history of the product, and can alert you when the best price matches your specified budget. By seamlessly connecting shoppers from any website they shop at, to better offers from every merchant online – Shopping Caddy promises to transform the Internet into one organically integrated marketplace.

Chris Shipley, Executive Producer of the DEMO Conferences, said, “The verticals Cazoodle is launching at DEMOfall are an impressive leap forward in domain-specific structured data crawling.” She added, “And the technology behind it is even more intriguing. We’re looking forward to the results when the technology is put to the test across a wide variety of search applications.”

“The best part of our technology is that it generalizes across many application domains,” notes Dr. Chang. The company already has a similar application for finding apartment rentals listings for any location in the United States, and plans to expand to provide more applications.

About Cazoodle

Cazoodle is a startup originating from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. The company was founded in 2006 by Prof. Kevin Chang and his research team at the university to build products and technologies for large scale data integration. The company aims to enable novel applications that can integrate and organize information from many different web sources, and thus, make the process of real world information discovery on the Web more efficient. For more information please visit Cazoodle at www.cazoodle.com .