State of the industry (Cont’d)
200 - 500k stores are currently on the web
~20,000 new stores every month -> 1M in 18 Months
XML is still in very early stages of adoption
- Crawling and HTML parsing very much real
Store formats change frequently -- major site upgrades typically twice a year
Stores down on average 14 days / year
Largest shopping sites have wrapped ~2000 stores
- (by comparison, text search engines crawl 10% of the web)