Dave Naffziger's Blog

If you read the other JB Blogs, you’re already aware that we’ve launched a beta vertical search site: CouponLooker

There are hundreds of great coupon sites out there. But it is simply not possible for any one of them to be comprehensive. Our goal was to create a resource that makes it easy for users to search the entire landscape of coupon sites. Google just sends users to pages. We surface, rank and dedupe the coupons so that users don’t have to do this work themselves. By making the coupons more accessible and easier to find, we also hope to increase the number of people that search and find coupons online. We expect to drive many new customers to the coupon sites.

We realized early on that we needed to make the coupon sites that comprise our search index successful. Coupon sites make money by embedding their affiliate codes into the links to the merchant websites. We don’t link directly to merchant websites - all of our links go back to the coupon sites with the most relevant coupon codes. Instead of affiliate revenue, we expect to make our money through sponsored advertisements along the top and right of the search results (currently sponsored links).

The search algorithm still has a way to go, but we’ve built it in a way that enables us to iterate quickly. I think it provides usable results today, but that we’ll be able to blow the current implementation out of the water in the near future.

You can also install a coupon search widget for your blog (I need to work with my template to make the sidebar larger so it can fit):