OK, so we all know that buying online is the way that we're going to get better prices and a better selection of goods. However, we then find the problem of how to actually find the things that we want to buy. Using a regular search engine is of course hopeless as we'll end up finding only those who are best at scamming the search engines for placement.

Using a comparison engine can be even worse than that, as in general the offers tend to come from those who have paid to be added to the engine. However, ShopWiki is pioneering a very useful and very different approach.

To begin with, they offer buyer's guides: what is it that we should be looking out for? Take a look at this one of outdoors equipment. Now within that guide they've got both the information we need to help us decide upon a product: and also their search engine function tries to find everyone on the web selling whatever it is we decide that we want. So we get the best of both worlds there.

Their buyers guides go a lot deeper than that though as well: for example, hiking boots, GPS devices and backpacks all have their own guides nesting underneath the main one.

It's a new and different way of trying to organise the online shopping experience and it looks very interesting indeed. Try it out.