FatLens Adding Six Shopping Search Engines

The company launched an event ticket search service in June, and will expand to offer an additional half-dozen vertical search engines.

The current version of FatLens sifts through ticket sellers, marketplaces, and classified listings to find event tickets that a single site would not have listed. An Internet Retailer report says the company will expand and add six more search engines.

Those engines, searching for accessories, apparel, electronics, jewelry, luggage, and shoes, should debut in October. Search rankings will be derived from “aggregated purchasing and search preferences” by consumers. Paid placements won’t impact the rankings.

The report notes that users searching for a particular manufacturer will not see results from competing manufacturers. This seems to be a nod to the recent Geico-Google settlement regarding competitors buying Geico as an AdWords keyword phrase. FatLens looks like they want no part of that type of litigation.

FatLens CEO Nanda Kishore is cited in the report as perceiving “frustrations” experienced by online shoppers. The company sees those frustrations coming from search engines that focus on information rather than products or the merchants that sell them.

Previously, Yahoo! Research Chief Prabhakar Raghavan has been an advisor for the company. The firm organized under the name IM2, and began operations in 2003. Its FatLens search launched in January of this year, with venture capital from three Silicon Valley firms.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.