I’ll be perfectly honest with you… I’ve never been a fan of shopping search engines and shopping review sites. Lycos, Epinions, Froogle (Google owned), Kelkoo (Yahoo! owned), Zencudo, the lot… I’ve found that doing my own digging often reveals better results, that the reviews can often be rather biased towards or against a product, and that the engines tend to miss the big-hitting offers from websites such as Amazon. The result? I’ll simply Google the product. It’s not hard, it’s not tricky and it takes a matter of seconds.

Twenga ordered up a sponsored review the other day and on sight, my inital reaction was a mix of sceptiscism and interest. Taking the opportunity, I decided to dive right in and take a look at Twenga myself. The first thing that hit me? Twenga is in beta. Their logo makes that pretty clear, at any rate. The site’s design is clean and well categorized, however the navigation strikes me as a tad confusing. Users are invited to join up and create an account initially and signup is simple. Just pick a password and fill in your e-mail address.

Covering everything from fashion and gaming, to automobiles and gastronomic armagnacs, Twenga has you covered. The navigation however, stands out as a major “thorn in the side” for Twenga. Some of the sites nicer features are buried beneath piles of pages, or links to them are not made particularly visible. For instance, it took me a few moments to locate their ‘Popular Queries‘ page (something which I think around Christmas Time for instance, could be a fantastic tool), only to find it didn’t actually seem to be functioning. Either that, or the list was simply not populated due to the new nature of the site. Either way, till there’s something to show, we won’t know for sure.

Certainly, Twenga is one of the most feature-packed and accurate engines out there, but until their entire navigation system is re-worked, I’ll be sticking to good ol’ Google. Again I’ll say there are many aspects of the site I like it for (the price-drop notifier, the ‘up-to-date offer finder’, the merchant activity status, etc.) however something feels to be missing. It’s definitely a step above and beyond the likes of Lycos in many aspects, but I’d class website usability as one of the fundamental reasons for not switching right away. In six months time, when the categories are less cluttered, not posted in both the header and the sidebar and has a cleaner ‘Amazon-style-tabbed-navigation’ system, you can count me back in for more.

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