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AB asked me to mention how I find some good deals on the internet. Recently I was able to pick up a KBC Force Airborne helmet for $129 (that is $50 below the KBC MAP limit price). Also I snatched up a pair of Alpinestars GP Pro gloves for $69, (that is $110 below the Alpinestars MAP limit price).

So how did I do this? Was it from Ebay? No not at all, I got these great deals from National mail order houses. No Bidding, begging or other tricks were used. Just knowledge about how the webs biggest search engine works.

First and foremost, Google is your internet search friend. Most people don’t know that Google has a “Low Price” search function. All you need to do is go to froogle.google.com and search for what you want. Froogle offers many options to display your search as a list or a grid. I like the grid format because it shows a nice thumbnail and allows you to search more items at once.

The trick to using Froogle (and the standard Google engine as well) is to understand that many items have different ways of being displayed in a webpage. For example you can search for a pair of gloves by Name (Alpinestars GP Pro Gloves, GP Pro Gloves, etc.). You can also search by the alpinestars part number F-8286 as many websites list the manufacturer’s part number. Beyond that you can search by close names, trying GP-Pro, GP Gloves, Alpinestars Gloves, etc may help you find some hidden items.

While the froogle.google.com engine is good, some sites “Opt out” of pages that are listed below the MAP. The MAP is the Manufactures Advertised Price policy. MAP’s are becoming more and more popular as both retailers and web stores complain to lost business by low priced searches. Many places hate the fact that though the internet the price of an object has become the bottom line. So manufactures make retailers adhere to MAP’s for prices posted on the internet.

Some retailers like “Motorcycle Accessory Warehouse” and “Newenough.com” get around this by having special webpage’s that can be found though links via e-mail price requests. This is just one way around MAP price limit policies.

When Froogle pulls up the same price for a dozen online stores, you can bet a MAP is in action. To get around this, you can start searching on google.com itself. Since most websites want Google to see each and every page for the main search engine (Froogle.google.com is an opt-in system). You can do a search in le.com”>Google for the item you are looking for. For example you can search for the Alpinestars GP Pro glove, but add the word “Sale”, “Closeout”, or “Clearance” to your search. This will eliminate review pages and peoples Blog comments for what you are searching for. I found the GP Pro gloves on “closeout” in a hidden webpage inside azmotorsports.com. Looking though the store.azmusa.com webpage would have taken weeks to find such sale items.

There are more Google tricks, were you can search a specific website only. Just try KBC airborne site:www.helmetharbor.com and see that you get that helmet for that one website. Many times I do a search of several of my favorite websites for deals. I do this when Google finds a hit, but the webpage is “not available”. You can learn more about Googles many command functions, including searching just .PDF’s, .DOC and .XLS pages. Scare yourself silly and find out how many Microsoft excel files are cataloged on Google and how excel files have lots of lovely data in some of them, like credit cards.

Taking deal searching to the next level requires a second e-mail address, or in my case e-mail address #40. And there is nothing better than setting up a Gmail account for free. At 2gigs of e-mail space, built in “spam” filter, web access and pop3 mail access you can’t go wrong. Give Gmail.google.com a spin to setup a free e-mail account.

Once you got your lovely e-mail account on Google, the next step is to join every mail list from your favorite websites. newenough.com, accwhse.com, AzMotorsports.com and many others will send out deals of the week e-mails. You will get offers for closeout items, online coupons and lots and lots of spam. Luckily Gmail cuts about 75% of the spam for you, and the other 25% can be taken care of in other ways. In my case I download all my Gmail with a POP3 e-mail client. I love the FREE e-mail offered by mozilla.org called Thunderbird. By turning on the POP3 mail feature in Gmail (you need to opt in to get your g-mail via POP3 e-mail) you can grab all these free e-mails. Just download thunderbird and follow the steps in Gmail’s help section and you should be downloading in a few minutes.

Now why would you want to download the e-mails anyway? I mean they are on Gmail right? Well the bonus is to have all this stuff offline so you can sort and search for things. Many of these e-mails will offer coupons good for weeks or months, so you can always get a good deal. Thunderbird offers e-mail filters that will send e-mails from each location to a special box. You can then look for deals when you have a chance in a nice organized fashion.

Finally some of the best deals come from going offline. MAW does not post many prices. If you give them a call (24hr a day none the less), they will give you a price over the phone. I have found you can even “negotiate” the shipping rates. Once they offered to ship me a tire for $18 including insurance. I kind of balked at that and said others offered $8 shipping and they matched it. Remember the deal is out the door and not on the front end. Sometimes I buy something $1 higher to get free shipping, which many places like Chaparral motorsports offer.

That is it; give these low price web searching info a try…. And why not share your special way to get lower prices?