Initial reviews of the new portal have been positive, with testers complimenting the addition of RSS feeds for all of the site's searches, as well as the "clean and quite simple user interface."

Others said they felt that this new edition to the MSN Search family would be a direct competitor to Shopping.com, Froogle, and Yahoo Shopping.

Of the second MSN Shopping beta, Greg Linden of Findory.com said he considered the ratings and reviews to be "a big deal."

(Linden wrote the first recommendation engine used by Amazon.com, and later led the software team that developed Amazon.com's personalization systems.)

"The key will be getting a large number of high quality, trustworthy, authoritative reviews from users and other sources," Linden said. MSN's existing relationship with Consumer Reports is "progress toward this goal," he said, "but (current) coverage of those reviews is quite limited."

Linden has definite ideas about the kinds of tools required for a successful online shopping program.

"Search helps people find something when they know exactly what they want. Content, ratings, and reviews help shoppers differentiate between products. Personalization helps surface interesting items buried in the long tail. Combined, shoppers can find and discover the right product at the right price," Linden blogged.

MSN quietly released the first Beta of the new shopping program in February, pulling it just days before announcing an alliance PriceGrabber.com on June 13. The alliance was intended to enhance the MSN product selection, add comparison shopping functions, and make available to users PriceGrabber's database of product ratings and reviews. The alliance made millions of additional products available to MSN shoppers.

In other shopping portal news, Become.com beta-released its comparison shopping service this week.

Sean O'Rourke of OrganizedShopping.com wrote in his review" that "Become.com maintains an interesting position at the intersection of shopping and search. They have more flexibility to deliver shopping-flavored content than general search engines, and they have more technology to provide web-aware content than comparison shopping engines.

However, O'Rourke also noted that "If Become intends to compete in all aspects of the buying process, the challenge could come from avoiding middle-the-road standalone functionality, such as having less items than search-based Froogle, or less structure than labor-intensive comparison engines like Shopping.com."