A lot of comparison shopping engines (CSE) have recently changed their looks. A while ago, all CSE’s had categories prominently displayed on their homepage. Now, it seems that almost all CSE’s are turning away from that look-and-feel, giving ‘ search’ a much more dominant place.
Also, the homepage of all revamped CSE’s focuses more on popular products and themes (probably also to accomodate the women). It almost seems as if all these CSE’s make use of the same design agency 
Just take a look at the new websites (displayed by live date):
Shopping.com:
Kelkoo:
Pricegrabber (still in A/B testing):
So it seems that comparison engines do not like to experiment. They rather copy what the other one is using. However, some time ago Shopzilla made a bold step to only display a search box… It is still there, so they must be satisfied. But, you better have a damn great search functionality!
Shopzilla:
Filed under: Comparison shopping, Online merchants, Online shopping Tagged: | CSE new looks, look-and-feel
[...] new design follows the other redesigns of big comparison engine (which I wrote about in an earlier blog post). Probably a usability expert told all these CSE’s that the categories should be displayed on [...]
[...] Try to find the differences!! Read me post from November 29, 2007: Comparison engines copy-cats?… [...]