BikePimp re-launched

good work, it's a really great website! thanks a lot.

It's a nice idea, and I'm sure it's a lot more useful with more common items (ie. deore shifter vs. phil track hubs). Problem is, at the moment it seems significantly less helpful than a simple Google search. I'm no fan of the google monopoly on all information (tm), and I'd love to see you win out, but at the moment they are your direct competition.

I just tried a couple of searches from the 'search spy' on bikepimp. The first one (hope qr skewers) gave me 3 result on BP, and 86 on google froogle (10 of which were cheaper than BP). This seems to be the pattern every time I've tried BP.

Firstly, I think you need to include every bike source available.. I'm sure you're working on this, so forgive me for criticising. I quite often find that the best deals come from suprising places (often not bike specific, eg. skate shops that happen to sell a set of hubs at knock down prices). Not sure of an easy way to find all these places, maybe scraping google for sources? or incentivising users to add sources they find (I know I'd be up for doing this, if only because it'd help me to find that killer deal again when I actually have the money to buy it)?

Secondly, a good synonym system is necessary. eg 'bars'=(bars, handlebars) 'qr'=(qr, 'quick release') etc. In the example above, the cheapest skewers were described as 'quick release' not 'qr' - google automatically picked up on this. This is one place where knowledge about bikes can beat google's automated approach, they don't know that 'track hubs' are also likely to be called 'fixed hubs' , we do.

I recognise you've only just been re-leaunced though, so please take my suggestions as constructive. It's a great service, and I'll be keeping you bookmarked

http://www.pimpthatsnack.com/project.php?projectID=302

yeah, i tried a few things and got zero results. Again, I'd rather you get more results than google, but this is not easy!