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Company Overview

We founded Become, Inc. in early 2004 with a mission to help people make ideal buying decisions. As avid shoppers, we realized the tremendous difficulty associated with researching new products and services.

We found that none of the available shopping services met all of our needs. General purpose search engines were fine for general purpose queries, but they frequently provided search results unrelated to shopping or page after page of merchants trying to sell us something. At the other end of the spectrum, price comparison sites never showed comprehensive research information such as buying guides, product reviews, articles, forums, and other useful shopping information.

We are working to provide comprehensive, relevant, and unbiased research information to help you choose the right product. We also provide a comparison shopping service to help you get the best deal. Finding the right product at the best price to save you time and money --that is our goal. We are meeting this goal by developing innovative new technologies and search services.

We hope that you enjoy using Become.com. We would love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think and how we could improve our service. Thank you!

AIR™ Technology

AIR™ (Affinity Index Ranking) technology is our revolutionary, patent-pending technology for ranking web pages. AIR™ technology provides highly targeted search results by understanding the context of pages on the web. Become's AIR technology was published in the August 2009 issue of Communication of the ACM which is one of the most prestigious journals in computer science and engineering. Download the article: "Ranking Billions of Web Pages Using Diodes".

We believe that AIR™ technology vastly improves the overall search experience. If a consumer is searching for a "television," for example, AIR™ technology returns information that can be used to aid the research process and help consumers educate themselves on buying a television. General search engines often return information that is irrelevant to shoppers such as the web sites of various television stations.

AIR™ technology represents a fundamentally new approach to ranking web pages that integrates advanced concepts from Applied Physics and Engineering Dynamics. It identifies exceptional web pages by understanding the level of interconnection between valuable sites from within specific fields of interest. AIR™ technology evaluates a web page based on what other "knowledgeable" sites in that specific field say about the page, and also evaluates the page based on what the page says about other "knowledgeable" sites in the specific field.

AIR™ technology considers a site to be valuable if 1) it receives links from valuable sites within a similar topic of interest and 2) if it provides links to other valuable sites within a similar topic of interest (while minimizing links to off-topic sites). General purpose search engine technologies such as Google's PageRank™ estimate the popularity of a given web page by looking only at links into the page and do so without any understanding of context.

By obtaining the standing of a web page within a given topic, AIR™ technology is able to provide exceptionally focused search results for users.

To better understand the benefits of AIR™ technology, we invite you to conduct product searches on Become.com and compare us to other search engines.