I think I’ve mentioned 10 or 20 times before that I love to shop. So the news that there was a new shopping search engine that provides information and options for all aspects of the shopping experience intrigued me.

Called Become.com, the service includes tons of product reviews, lots of product details and other information that helps if you’re in the process of researching a product. There are also many comparison-shopping tools and direct links to merchants to streamline the process of actually making the purchase.

There are several more reasons Become.com is probably worth watching. It’s from the team that created the comparative shopping service engine MySimon, which CNET bought back in January 2000 for $700 million. That same team then created another search engine – WiseNet – which it sold for nearly $10 million in April 2002 to human-powered directory provider LookSmart.

Plus, Become.com is free to users and doesn’t require registration. That works for me.

Become.com already has an index of more than 3.2 billion pages of shopping related information from more than 40 million websites. It doesn’t rely on feeds and sponsored listings like many other shopping sites, but instead crawler-based technology designed to focus exclusively on shopping related information, which helps weed out non-shopping or spam links. Become.com also uses human editors to further refine its index.

For right now, Become.com only crawls U.S. sites that provide product and buying information. The company does not currently allow merchants to submit feeds though, that capability is due in the future. Like Google’s Froogle, Become.com will not charge for this service, but rather it will implement a cost-per-click model.

Become.com also includes a shopping-specific spell check feature, which uses a dictionary that includes model numbers, product and brand names and SKUs. There are also “search suggestions” generated by analyzing large numbers of pages related to your query and identifying key concepts.

If you’re not busy shopping, then you’re likely selling something. Let me know about your affiliate experiences with comparative shopping services.