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The full week also proved to be profitable: a one week sales record was set with shoppers spending some $6.8 billion online, up six percent from a year ago. Good news for retailers, some of which expressed concern that the timing of the snowstorm could have put a serious damper on what is traditionally the biggest shopping weekend before Christmas.

“Consumers have clearly continued to spend online later into the season this year,” comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni said. “Retailers have been very aggressive with late season promotions while informing consumers that they could still get their purchases shipped in time for Christmas, and these tactics seem to be paying off.”

What also could be helping is anecdotal evidence that retailers are not panicking like they did last year, cutting prices early which in turn cuts into profits. I’ve heard quite a few shoppers complain that the deals “just aren’t as good as last year.” Well, this year retailers have gotten a lot smarter in managing inventories, thus meaning less overstock to get rid of at the end of the season.

So here’s a question for our Northeast US readers. Did you stay in and shop online?

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But I did have fun thinking about both landmark shopping days as I wrote the first piece I’ve done for WePC.com in awhile. This one’s called “A Smart Skeptic’s Guide to PC Deals on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Beyond,” and is my attempt to summarize much of the advice I give friends and relatives who are shopping for computers during the holiday season. Take a look, share any tips of your own, then poke around WePC a bit–there’s lots of cool stuff there, including the opportunity to win free computers.

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Remember Joost? It’s been sold.

More on “the Google phone.”

Vudu movie service gets Wikipedia.

It’s war: Amazon vs. Wal-Mart.

More publishers talk Google withdrawal.

Google explains offensive image result.

Google and Tivo strike deal.

HP’s new iPAQ world phone.

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TheFind isn’t like a comparative pricing engine such as PriceGrabber, which returns results in a grid with lots of comparative info; nor is it like the review-centric Retrevo or Wize. Instead, it feels a little like a Google-style general-purpose search engine, except with extra features tailored to shopping–and all the results point to pages at e-commerce sites where you can buy stuff.

Among the shopping-centric features:

• Links to relevant coupons with each result (they usually aren’t product-specific, but offer stuff like free shipping and discounts for certain product categories);
• Results for both big-name resellers and small merchants you might not otherwise know about;
• Filters on the right which let you limit your search to a specific price range, vendor(s), brand(s), or style (these are neat–they remind me of travel search Godsend Kayak);
• Tabs across the top that take you to coupons, reviews, local retailers, and “green” options (in some cases, this last option seems to be equivalent to “things that don’t require batteries,” such as camera cases);
• A toolbar at the bottom that automatically saves all your searches and products, and lets you track favorite products, brands, and stores.

TheFind’s interface is pretty slick, and both the coupon feature and the breadth and depth of items it finds can definitely come in handy when you’re hunting for obscure items. (When I searched for “Nikon D90″ it pulled up intriguing accessories which I didn’t even know existed.)

But this site is more of an effective complement to other shopping engines than a replacement for them. For the tech products I searched for, at least, it’s not a very good place to go when you’ve decided on a particular product and want to quickly determine where to buy it. For one thing, it doesn’t cluster multiple merchants who offer a product in a grid with information about availability, shipping costs, and the like. For another, despite the wealth of products it includes, I had trouble finding some of the items I looked for: I couldn’t pull up any results for the iPhone 3GS or Palm Pre, and the only MacBook Pros it found seemed to be reconditioned ones.

And I found a few quirks: the site sometimes pointed me to coupons that were expired, and to local retailers who were indeed local, but who only sold the product in question through their mail-order arm.

I know I’ll use TheFind, but I’m still looking for a Great Universal Shopping Engine that’s so powerful and so useful that I don’t end up using several sites for different aspects of product research. If you’re aware of any comprehensive one-stop tools, lemme know, will you?

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Wize reminds me of Retrevo, but that site goes deep on a specific range of consumer electronics products, and Wize covers stuff of all sorts, including a broader range of tech items, video games, home appliances, food and wine, toys, baby products, perfume, toys, and more. It aggregates millions of user reviews (and some professional ones) from all over the Web, coming up with overall ratings, letting you browse individual reviews and find merchants, and letting you see how products compare–including Wize Choices (well-reviewed items) and Unwize Choices (poorly-reviewed ones).

The site has a slick and intuitive interface and a nice selection of tools for filtering results by price and features; digging into user reviews for a given item is a snap., and you can save Favorites for later perusal.

Wize’s highly automated nature lets it cover lots of ground, but it also results in some rough edges. There are places where its recommendations simply don’t make sense–such as its picks for best overall laptops, which include a desktop computer (HP’s TouchSmart) and something that isn’t a personal computer at all (the SonicWall security appliance–which, to make matters more confusing, Wize says it  doesn’t have any reviews for at all).

A feature that tries to recommend the best products for particular uses seems to be based on keywords in the reviews, but in many instances it’s just not smart enough. Here, for instance, it appears to have decided that a Gateway desktop is a good machine for designers because a review praised its design:

And I’m still figuring out how the site managed to come up with a section for…Toshiba Mac laptops.

I’m also not sure why Microsoft’s Zune HD isn’t the first result you get when you search for “Zune HD,” or why Wize hasn’t found any user reviews for the new Zune yet–there were 158 on Amazon alone when I checked. (To be fair, Retrevo didn’t have any Zune HD user reviews, either.)

One other thing: I like the fact that Wize’s tagline is “Reporting the best and worst products,” and that it picks Unwize Choices as well as Wize ones. Helping consumers avoid crummy products is at least as noble a mission as steering them towards winners. But Wize’s worsts aren’t anywhere near as easy to find as the bests. Wouldn’t it be cool if it could give you a list of the digital cameras which real people who paid their own money liked the least?

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I wrote a few months ago about my own personal gripe with Orbitz, which kept tacking charges onto my ticket for things I hadn’t asked for–that I think should be illegal, period. Of course, both Orbitz and Buy.com say they provide the “loyalty” services because they think customers want them, and they say very few people complain. But maybe one of the lessons here is that online check-out transactions should be streamlined and distraction-free, period. (Amazon.com’s shopping experience can be cluttered, but once you pay up, it does a good job of making it simple.)

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But even by normal standards, this offer from Dell that just arrived in my inbox is kinda silly. See if you can spot the absurdity:

Yup–Dell is trying to lure me to plunk down my money with a Special Offer of $4 off. Which, if you ask me, shouldn’t be dignified with an exclamation point. Even though it reflects just how cheap netbooks and other laptops have gotten: Back in the days when garden-variety notebooks went for $1500 and up, there wasn’t a soul on the planet who would have been tempted by a discount of four bucks. For a $400 machine, though, maybe such a price cut willl seal the deal in some cases–Dell obviously thinks so.

I wanted to do the math on what sort of discount $4 is percentage-wise, but it’s impossible: I don’t know whether to use the $503 price or the $399 one. Come to think of it, I  also can’t quite tell if the $4 discount is part of the $104 “Instant Savings,” or is in addition to it.

Which brings me back to my initial gripe here. Please, Dell…and everyone else who plays this game…just tell us how much the freakin’ computer costs?

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Apparently, someone in Redmond neglected to remember that Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year. The Cashback site was unable to cope with the heavy volume, and some customers–ones that were able to access the site at all, that is–were left with the wrong amount of cash back credited to their accounts.

One of the biggest snafus occurred when customers that were trying to take advantage of a generous 40 percent discount on HP products received as little as 3 percent cash back posted to their account, according to News.com, which also reported that Microsoft apoligized to shoppers who encountered Cashback glitches . A spokesperson told Technologizer that customers interested in following up on their Cashback rebate should contract Microsoft Live Search support to have their accounts credited.

The company’s initiative to compensate people for using its search engine began in May. Since that time, Microsoft’s share of the search business has fallen, according to multiple surveys. That’s not to say that the Live Search Cashback program is a bad idea–Microsoft is an underdog, and it needs to be creative and scrappy.

However, it had an opportunity to benefit from word of mouth had its Black Friday promotion gone well, and its failure to execute has left it at best no better off than it would have been on any given Friday.

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Can we all agree that there’s no discount on a 52-inch TV or a GPS device that is worth a single human life, or even the real risk of the loss of a single human life? And that American’s retailers should be damn careful about intentionally whipping teeming crowds of people into a frenzy?

Comparatively uninmportant side note: Sears.com crashed today, presumably under the weight of Black Friday traffic. It was down for about two hours.

Report on my day: I spent much of it bumming around bookstores in Northern California’s Sonoma county, getting a head start on my Christmas shopping. Got some good deals, too. I saw no angry crowds, didn’t have to engage in any fistfights, and don’t even remember standing in line for more than a couple of minutes…

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