A short while ago, ASUS was the only maker of these cheap, tiny notebooks. Now you can find similar products at the same price point from HP, Lenovo, Acer and others. It'll be interesting to see how well ASUS can grow in this new landscape.
We did something trivial along those lines and added a Facebook icon to our product pages. If you like a product, you can click the Facebook icon and the product name, image, price and store will show up in your "Posted Items". Yes, nothing spectacular, but we like it :)
For your particular search, "Dell Inspiron Laptop", I would expect our current product to return a bunch of batteries and accessories. Only because Dell sells computers like J. Crew sells clothes. That is, if you want to buy a J. Crew Sweater, your best bet is to walk into a J. Crew store.
Sony is a different case. You'll see their systems at many retailers. So, if you search "Sony Vaio"- http://bountii.com/search.php?item=sony+vaio , you'll find our results are more than adequate.
The major strength of current product is that it is great at finding the best prices for people who know what they want. We're in the process of improving our browsing capability as that's the way a lot of people like to shop. And, since we also want that to be one of our big strengths, we'll have to include "Dell Inspiron Laptops" from Dell in our index.
Thanks so much for taking time to do a thorough write up of our product!
"nine clean results and great prices from reliable vendors"... This is exactly the experience we want people to have when they use Bountii. Shoppers shouldn't have to spend 12 hours figuring out whether to give nearly $1000 to a vendor like Jepago (2/10 rating on resellerratings.com), when they can pay the same amount or less for the same product from a top retailer like Newegg.
Based on your feedback and others, we are working to make ZIP code entry more prominent, as it's something everyone should be using everytime they visit Bountii.
We do a few things to show our shoppers prices that other engines cannot:
1. We pay users to submit pricing information. This ensures that our price index is complete as there are some things that cannot be automated.
2. We show you all the hidden prices ("Click to See", "Add to Cart", etc) from all of our stores.
3. We include rebate and coupon savings in prices.
However, like you mentioned, a broader search- "Playstation 3", yields more than consoles. We're working hard to improve the quality of our results for broad searches like this. For now, we decided to make the price filter very accessible to people. When you get back more than consoles for your "Playstation 3" search, we hope you'll narrow your results to those "> $200" to skip over the games and accessories.
Currently we index prices for consumer electronics. If you look at products in this category, you'll find our results are better than our competitors- Google Products, Pricegrabber, Yahoo Shopping, etc.
I'm also flying out from Boston. Where were you able to find nonstops for $600+? Is that the best you could do? All I can find are nonstop fares starting at $800 for my travel dates.