Become.com Joins Shop.org, a Division of the National Retail Foundation; Comparison Shopping Search Engine Expands Network as Member of the Online Retail Organization

Business Wire, Sept 7, 2005

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Become.com, the only vertical search engine to combine comparison shopping with web-wide research for finding buying guides and product reviews, today announced it has joined Shop.org, a division of the National Retail Foundation. Become.com plans to leverage its new membership by collaborating with its peers to share information and gain new perspectives, insights and intelligence about online retailing.

Become.com's comparison shopping service allows consumers to find products that interest them and view photos, descriptions, and other relevant buying information. Consumers can compare actual prices (including shipping costs and tax) from a wide variety of merchants to find the best deal. Become.com's research service complements its comparison shopping service, by helping consumers determine the product that best meets their needs by locating relevant information such as buying guides, expert reviews, forums, articles, product recalls, and other highly targeted resources.

"Become.com has experienced a year of tremendous growth and development of our vertical comparison shopping search engine. We recently ended our six-month beta period after obtaining valuable feedback that dramatically improved our service. As we grow, our objective remains to provide the best service to our users, by way of giving them access to the most relevant, unbiased product reviews and buying guide information available," said Michael Yang, CEO and founder, Become.com. "By joining Shop.org, we will have direct line of communications with leaders in the retail industry and we look forward to collaborating with them to contribute to the development and growth of the online retail industry."

Become.com will attend the Shop.org Annual Summit in Las Vegas, NV, September 12-14, which is featuring IAC's Barry Diller as a keynote speaker.

"We are excited to see innovative companies such as Become.com join Shop.org and support the online and multi-channel retail community. We look forward to their contribution as a new member," said Scott Silverman, Executive Director, Shop.org.

About Become.com

Become.com is a new search engine and comparison shopping site that helps people find product reviews and buying information on millions of products and shop for those products from brand name retailers from across the web. Founded by Michael Yang and Yeogirl Yun, founders of pioneering online comparison shopping site mySimon, Become.com indexes over 3 billion pages of shopping related information and uses proprietary AIR(TM) (Affinity Index Ranking) technology to deliver targeted and relevant information for shopping searches.