New into the shopping search arena is TheFind.com, describing itself as "a discovery shopping search engine that delivers a comprehensive, relevant and visually compelling shopping experience optimized for lifestyle products." Once your head stops spinning you realize that all that is just marketing-speak for "it has in-depth descriptions and pictures."

Still in beta, the site uses its "Product Ranking Engine" technology to rank more than 150 million products from over 500,000 stores. The results it returns come with large product shots, and hovering over the pic gets you a description with a price range and what online stores carry it. You can also save results for future purchasing in a MyFinds section.

I tried their much-hyped "Find Similar Items" tool that is supposed to drill down your results to give you a narrower and more focused search. Great idea, but it's a little hinky. It's purpose is to let you find similar products to what you originally searched for, and offer suggestions. Depending on what you're searching for the results can run from Perfectly Matched to Hilariously Random.

A search for DVD players yielded hundreds of thousands of results. Choosing "Find Similar" while on a portable player resulted in just a few thousand results, all portable players. But when using Find Similar while looking through "golf drivers" I actually ended up with ten times more results, ranging from NASCAR hats ("drivers" as in stock car racers) to various tools ("drivers" as in driving a post into the ground). Pretty entertaining, (I wasted a couple of hours looking to see what other interesting suggestions it made. One of my favorites: searched Golf Tees, got back several types of Novelty Teeth), but not helpful. Hopefully they'll get that cleaned up before it comes out of beta.

www.thefind.com