3i has invested €2.6 million in European shopping search engine Twenga, which launched in the UK in early November.

The service has been fairly successful by focusing all its resources on Europe and comes translated in six different languages (French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, and English). The network reached 7 million visitors in November 2007 and indexed over 40 million offers from 25,000 merchants. Because it has no retailer bias product listings are not skewed in favour of one retailer over another, and the inventory of products is large. Consumers can narrow down search results from the largest possible product offering based on brand, colour, material, shop, price and product features.

Twenga’s search results include user reviews and images on top of the usual price comparisons. It also has several advanced features include price tracking and user reviews, allowing it to return a more complex result such as a 10% price drop in a product.

There are of course a mass of shopping product search engines including The Find, Mpire, Crowdstorm, Bountii, Retrevo, SmartShopper, Pricefight and Ugenie.