From Wendy Boswell,
Your Guide to Web Search.
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What is Clipfire?

Clipfire is a shopping search engine with a novel twist - it's also a community where you can post good deals, shopping sites that you like, products that you are particularly fond of, and more. It's like Digg but focused on shopping instead of technology.

How to Use Clipfire

You'll need to be as specific as possible with Clipfire; for instance, my search for wool coat got a ton of results. However, Clipfire gives you filtering options with the "Related Searches" to the right of your search results.

Clipfire search results are a bit different than what you're used to in most search engines; but they're very reminiscent of Digg. You can choose to clip a search result (and save it to your personal profile), get more details on the clip, see how many other people have clipped that search result, or make a comment. In addition, you can subscribe via RSS to any search that you run, a nice feature that's become standard on any search engine worth its' salt.

Clipfire Special Features

A good place to check first on Clipfire is the Clipfire Popular Deals section; this is where the really good bargain discounts can be found, as well as the most popular "clips" that people are passing around.

You can also view all the sites that have been clipped by Clipfire users at Clipfire Contributing Websites; in addition, if you would like to add a site to be clipped, you can contribute for free (registration required).

Why Should I Use Clipfire?

If the success of Digg and del.icio.us are any indication, community-powered sites such as Clipfire are going to be the new "it" thing in the field of Web search. Clipfire is easy to use, and while there's some usability features that need to be ironed out (search process is clunky, and shouldn't we have pictures available?), I see great potential in this community-powered shopping search engine.