Comparison shopping is a huge online industry, which is not hard to understand. Shopping search engines help you compile offers from various shopping sites, making it easier to identify the right product and the right price.

Normally comparison shopping search engines will present the offers as regular search results on their own search result pages. This makes it possible for them to give priority to their preferred business partners, giving the comparison shopping search engine a larger piece of the pie.

There is nothing wrong in that. This is business, after all.

San Francisco Bay based ShoppingVale.com has chosen another and seemingly more simplistic approach. Instead of gathering all results on one page, it guides you to the relevant pages of the various shopping sites.

When you do a search ShoppingVale.com will bring you to a page with tabs for each of the featured shopping sites. A click on the tab for Amazon.com will, for instance, give you the relevant Amazon.com page in a frame below the row of tabs.

The technology behind this service is amazingly simple. “Anyone could do it!” Well, but ShoppingVale did, and it works.

There are eight categories presenting eight different “sets” of shopping sites: Electronics, Coupons, Reviews, Toys, Apparel, Jewelry, Books, and General.

Among the sites presented we find giants like Amazon, eBay, Sears, Target, and WallMart, as well as other more traditional comparison shopping search engines (PriceGrabber, Deals2Buy).

There is also a “Side by Side” option that opens up a new window with a row of alternative shopping sites. Tick of the shopping sites that interests you the most and ShoppingVale will split the window into several frames, each frame presenting the relevant result page.

You should not select too many sites if you use this option, as the individual pages may become unreadable.

If you sign up for a free account, you can also customize the selection of shopping sites included.

Our verdict: ShoppingVale will not revolutionize online shopping, but the system works and it is useful. Maybe you could try it out for your Christmas shopping!

Note though, that it is US-centric. Non-Americans would probably find it more sensible to go elsewhere.

Pandia Shopping has a large list of other online shopping search engines.