Become.com Introduces Affinity Index Ranking (AIR)
-- First Search Engine Technology Designed for Contextual Exploration of Product and Shopping Related Information
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- March 14, 2005 -- Become.com, a search engine that helps people find product reviews and relevant buying information, today announced Affinity Index Ranking (AIR), its revolutionary, patent-pending technology for ranking web pages. AIR provides highly targeted search results by understanding the context of pages on the web.
"AIR is the first ground-breaking advancement in search engine technology since Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) introduced PageRank(TM) in the late 1990s. The AIR algorithms are highly advanced and ideally suited to specific topical areas such as shopping research," said Yeogirl Yun, founder, chairman and CTO at Become.com.
"By introducing AIR, Become.com will vastly improve the overall search experience," adds Michael Yang, founder, president and CEO of Become.com. "If a consumer is searching for a 'television,' AIR returns information that can be used to aid the research process and help consumers educate themselves on buying a television. General search engines return irrelevant information such as various television stations."
AIR represents a fundamentally new approach to ranking web pages that integrates advanced concepts from Applied Physics and Engineering Dynamics. AIR identifies exceptional web pages by understanding the level of interconnection between valuable sites from within specific fields of interest. AIR 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.
Unlike Become.com's AIR, Google's PageRank estimates the popularity of a given web page by looking only at links into the page and doing so without any understanding of context. Become.com's AIR, on the other hand, 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).
"By obtaining the standing of a web page within a given topic, Become.com's AIR technology is able to provide exceptionally focused search results for users," Yun continues.
Become.com's beta is now available to consumers at www.become.com/beta.
About Become.com
Become.com is a search engine for shopping that helps people find product reviews and buying information on million of products across the web. Founded by Michael Yang and Yeogirl Yun, founders of pioneering online comparison shopping site mySimon, Become.com indexes over 2.2 billion pages of shopping related information from over 20 million web sites and uses proprietary ranking technology AIR (Affinity Index Ranking) to deliver targeted and relevant information for shopping searches.