Hunt Down Great Holiday Deals on Ugenie

Got a nifty tip for this new service, still in beta, which might help you out in your holiday shopping.

Ugenie is a shopping search service designed to help you track down the best price on books, music, movies, and video games. Yes, I know other services like Froogle (which is horribly disorganized) and Pricegrabber are legion on the web, but many of those have become difficult to navigate, namely because they promote their "preferred partners" (read: the stores which give them a bigger cut of the sale by way of commission) to the top of all search results. And then there are all the junk stores that seem less than reputable to sift through... the ones with impossible deals and sketchy return policies. Ultimately it takes quite a bit of digging around to find the true best deal from a website you might truly consider buying from.

In my testing with the site, I've actually found that Ugenie can find better prices on many items than Pricegrabber (if you exclude the erratic eBay, which Pricegrabber includes). In some cases, I found books for less than half the price that Pricegrabber had on offer. The design is clean and streamlined, a welcome change.

The main problems come from the fact that Ugenie is still in beta and requires some searching time before your results are displayed. (Pricegrabber is more instantaneous.) And of course there's the issue of comprehensiveness: Media is only a small part of the puzzle. Will Ugenie ever match the selection of items on Pricegrabber, which includes such items as electronics, toys, and even mortgages? Then again, if the results aren't great, I'd rather see a more limited selection.

Give Ugenie a spin when you're shopping this holiday season. You might find some amazing deals!

Got additional deal-hunting tips? Post them here!