Google Trends is a free and easy way to benchmark how often consumers are searching for a website by name, to get an idea of a site’s relative brand pull instead of its power at buying product keyword terms (in the case of comparison shopping sites).

Comparing searches for the terms “nextag”, “pricegrabber” and “shopzilla” yields a stronger trend line for Pricegrabber for most of the year, with Shopzilla taking over during the holiday season sometimes, probably as a result of doing branded advertising during those periods perhaps. Brand is not everything when it comes to comparison shopping engines, and a facility in buying traffic is something that the engines have had to acquire reluctantly or not, but it does provide a core base of consumers upon which to build and who knows, perhaps at some point one or more of these sites might actually turn into a legitimate consumer brand. For now, realizing that the biggest sites in the category are still branded somewhat less well than smaller ones like Pricegrabber, we may have to wait a while for that day.