For twenty five years I used one website for finding the best prices on computer equipment. I learned about this in the 1990s and I used it for everything.
This website was better than google. It searched all sorts of companies and allowed you to find ANY product, and allowed you to find the best pricing for that product.
Imagine froogle.com (the old name for shopping.google.com) combined with the power of the Yahoo directories. I mean cheers to the greatest.
If you goto this website today it just gives and error. But if you look it up on archive.org you can see what it did. For the record archive.org is a website that allows you to see old versions of nearly ANY website.
I had heard that this website was funded by Paul Allen. That might correlate to why it’s gone. Who knows. I could probably look up the owners via a historical WHOIS search. And I really should research a correlation like that before putting it on the internet.
I’ve said goodbye to a few friends lately. But this one hurts the most:
https://web.archive.org/web/20191129122612/http://pricewatch.com/system_memory/
From there, you could choose any of these components. I mean, to this day, this SLAUGHTERS what google does. Google just can’t compete with a free website that came out in the 1990s and never charged a penny.
When you click on each of those items, you would have seen each vendor that carried that part, showing the cheapest listing (for that part) sorted from top to bottom.
Shopping like this isn’t this easy any longer. I think that Pricewatch charged computer companies to integrate with their sites.. but then again, that’s a claim that is unsubstantianted so I shouldn’t repeat.
I just think that it’s a shame that the technology that we have TODAY is ‘less powerful’ than the technology that we had nearly 25 years ago.
Cheers to you, pricewatch.com!