A new website has just launched that might make your bargain hunting life a little easier, my dear readers. CouponLooker is a search engine that brings coupons from multiple sources at your fingerprints.
This is a very timely offering. I have reviewed websites aggregating deals in the past here and here but this is the first time I write about aggregating coupons. My monthly list of coupon sites keeps growing and for someone to launch a search engine like this was just a matter of time.
The site has been brought to life by the folks from JudysBook who seem to dip their toes into deals/coupons niche ever deeper each time I come to visit their place. The last update added local mapping feature which lets you see those deals marked on your local area map. Check it out.
Affiliate or not?
CouponLooker seems to be a step aside from that road to the fairyland of affiliate marketing which didn’t start very smoothly for JudysBook.
We tried to get a broad base of coupon sites into our indexes to provide useful results to consumers. Long term we’d like to be comprehensive.
This was from Rahul Pathak, the VP of Product Development at Judy’s Book. The search engine seems to follow the business model used by Google and Yahoo who generate revenue via sponsored results and context ads. You can already see ads on the right side bar of the search results page. I am yet to find a sponsored result though.
I have been using the tool for some time now and the impression is very positive so far. The website is very cleanly designed. The search results are arranged by the partner advertising the coupon. Some results can be further expanded into sub results if multiple offers are detected from the same partner. More often than not you can see the coupon expiration date and/or other details within the results.
Where is my coupon?
The only big problem I see with the tool is that after clicking through the link I get to the partner page with tens or hundreds of coupons and my particular coupon is not highlighted or marked in any way. This is not very convenient since I then have to look around that page searching for what I need.
Another interesting feature offered by CouponLooker team is a blog widget. I have embedded one in this post for you to see. You can search for coupons from the widget itself but you will have to go to the main site to get details on those coupons after you click on the results in the widget. Is that extra click really necessary? I guess this is just an effort, and a rather lousy one, to get you to visit the main site more often.
Conclusion
This is a very interesting idea and a useful search engine. I am really impressed. As long as the team stays independent and open regarding how results are ordered and what sources are crawled, I am going to recommend it to anyone as a great time and money saving tool. What is your opinion?
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