Yet Another T-Shirt Search Engine

The guys at ShirtSeek.com told me about their site about a week ago but I didn’t want to post about it too quickly as some people might think that this is a blog mainly about t-shirt search engines after having just made posts about Teenormous and PleaseDressMe. Actually this is my favorite of the three search engines partly because it doesn’t discriminate against PODs such as Cafepress and Zazzle. Whats more though, is that not only can you submit your shirts or other people’s shirts you can also share in the affiliate profits generated by this site. Can it get any better than that? Well. Yes. You can also rate and comment on the designs.

The design is very simple but I like it. The only criticism I have is that I don’t like the way the designs look on the little pencilled shirts. I think showing the actual t-shirt would look much better and also help us choose our shirts faster.

I don’t know how many shirts they have in their database but hopefully the guys will step up and let us know.

Well my litmus test is once again Obama.

Shirtseek: 24
Teenormous: 32
PleaseDressMe: 16

Teenormous – Another T-Shirt Search Engine

I believe this t-shirt engine was actually released a few days before PleaseDressme. Teenormous, like PleaseDressMe, is also not really a search engine but a database of t-shirts manually selected by the site owners. They do have almost 15,000 shirts in that database though which is pretty impressive.

A search for Obama turned up 30 results which is much better than PleaseDressme’s 12 (3 when I originally checked). Also for t-shirt shop owners there is a way to submit a feed of your t-shirts to get included in the directory quickly but Cafepress owners, don’t get too excited, more than likely you can’t have your t-shirts listed there. They may make exceptions if you have your own domain and some great designs though.

I complained about PleaseDressMe’s site design but at least they had design. This site looks like it was just thrown together. It is functional though and that is the important thing.

PleaseDressMe T-Shirt Search

A search engine for t-shirts is a pretty good idea. It saves you from having to scan the products of various websites to find what you are looking for and you may even discover a few new t-shirt sites in the process. In my opinion though, search engines should be comprehensive and this one is far from comprehensive. For example when I searched “Obama” the results showed only three results when everyone knows that there is a huge selection and that that is it growing everyday. Of course it is a new site and I’m sure the Obama results will steadily increase.

I don’t know how tees are added to the search engine but my guess is that they are manually added which means that it will never be a comprehensive list. They are using a lot of popular t-shirt sites like T-Shirt Hell, Snorg Tees and Busted Tees. I suspect that POD t-shirts will never be added making this t-shirt more of an exclusive directory in the form of a search engine.

They provide a wiget for bloggers etc. to place on their site and everytime someone purchases something after linking from the widget the blogger will be put in a draw for a free t-shirt. Pretty cool. The site seems to be monetized by using the affiliate codes for various sites. Perhaps the free t-shirts are from places like Threadless that don’t have a cash affiliate program.

Anyway, the concept is pretty cool but unfortunately nobody had told the site designers that the Web 2.0 look is over and it’s too soon for it to be retro.