I started ComparisonEngines because I was using the shopping comparison engines for a number of consulting clients, and I couldn’t find out any information about the industry. Everyone was talking about Google AdWords and there were plenty of blogs about search engine optimization and affiliate markeitng, but just one site discussing the shopping comparison engines.

At the same time, everyone and their mother had a blog. Why not me? My second interview was with Dan Ciporin, the former CEO of Shopping.com (I’ve come a long way from those first couple posts). A couple weeks later, Shopping.com was purchased by eBay. A couple weeks after that, Shopzilla was purchased by EW Scripps. The rest is history.

My original audience were VCs and media as the summer of 2005 was the summer of vertical search. Next the shopping comparison engines started to read ComparisonEngines. Finally, around October of last year, the merchants showed up in droves asking for help with their feeds, help dealing with crappy customer service, help addressing click fraud, etc.

I’ve never taken more than a couple meals from the shopping comparison engines as I wanted to remain an independent analyst. In fact, ComparisonEngines has no ads on the site…no AdSense, no YPN, no nothing.