Notice more smoke in the air this holiday season? It's not wafting off your yule log -- it's blowing hot and heavy from a passel of "personal shopping" web sites that claim they offer unique and unbiased comparison shopping services.

"He shops thousands of stores so you don't have to!" mySimon.com boasts of its online mascot, Simon, whose Max Headroom-meets-Rob Petrie headshot appears in slightly disturbing variations on almost every page.

"The ultimate tool for shopping, both online and in your neighborhood!" brags StoreRunner.com, Another site, Dealtime.com, boosts its services with prime-time television adds that urge holiday shoppers to "let us deal with it."

The idea is certainly appealing: These and other shopping scouts that 5th Estate reviewed can be major time- and money-savers for consumers. They make it easy to find the best prices without having to visit each and every retailer's web site. The scouts use sophisticated search tools - called "bots" - to comb the web. Then, when a consumer asks to see prices on a name-brand product or a dozen roses, for example, they display a list of retailers and their prices. Many sites hold more than a mall's worth of items -- diverse offerings of everything from pet food, groceries, flowers, electronics, toys, videos, and clothing to personal financial services. And all offer discounts on some items. To buy, consumers click on the retailer listed, and the Internet then takes them to the retailer's own site to complete the transaction.

But while all of the sites reviewed here have good privacy policies -- they all say they won't sell any personal information about you - not all are equally good. Most of them don't list shipping costs, which can be significant when buying low-priced items. Some don't have enough stores in each category. Finding land-based stores with the best prices in your home town is still more a wish than a reality. And on most sites, the merchants pay a fee to have themselves listed at the top. The exception to this practice is Bizrate.com which ranks merchants according to customer surveys.

DEALIN' WITH DYLAN

We decided to compare the sites by checking their ratings policies, privacy statements and prices on a test item, a Bob Dylan compact disc.

When we asked for prices on Dylan's Blood on the Tracks disc, our results varied widely. No scout site offered the same number of retailers. It was reassuring, however, to find that retailers whose names appear on several sites offer the same prices everywhere. For example, no matter where Amazon.com appeared, its price for the CD was the same: $11.49.

mySimon.com, one of the largest comparison sites, listed 16 merchants and prices for the disc ranging from $8.61 to $11.88. But mySimon gives shipping-cost information only when a merchant pays for the privilege. With shipping for a disc running from a couple of dollars to more than $5, a merchant's lower-priced CD can be offset by a higher shipping charge.

Dealtime and Storerunner also skipped the shipping-fee costs. Dealtime's shipping fee information is "being implemented now," according to Deborah Sack, Dealtime's vice president for marketing communications. Representatives of Storerunner and mySimon say there are no immediate plans to add shipping information for every item.

The site that handled shipping costs the best was Dealpilot.com, which allows users to input their state before doing a comparison. Exact shipping fees pop up automatically when an item is searched. Dealpilot also offered information on store discounts, shipping times and methods, and sales tax. Dealpilot had one of the lowest prices for our Dylan disc: $8.38, plus $2.99 shipping from Cdnow.com. Dealpilot's drawback is its limited categories: just books, music and movies.

Bizrate.com has a wider variety of offerings than Dealpilot, but displays only shipping estimates based on the minimum fee a merchant charges. "By comparing different merchants you can get a range of what you should be paying for shipping and where you're going to get the best deal," said Colleen Harrington, Bizrate's public relations coordinator.

BIAS ANYONE?

Bizrate outclasses other sites in one important regard: merchants don't pay for high placement on their lists. Instead, Bizrate sends surveys to consumers who rank retailers on their prices, shipping policies, customer service, and other criteria. Harrington explains: "Since the ratings we compile are consumer feedback - we don't accept ads from these merchants - when you do a search on our site, the merchant that comes to the top is the merchant that meets our criteria." Bizrate collects data from millions of customer surveys, and makes its money by providing the survey information to retailers. About 25,000 reviews, concerning about 2,200 merchants, are collected and tallied each day, Harrington said.

Consumer Reports' online magazine has chosen to supplement its ratings with Bizrate's information because of its high standards for gathering shopping data. "We feel that it's important to have a strong methodology - a methodology that is stronger than asking a few people what they thought," said Nancy Macagno, director of new media at Consumer Reports.

At the other sites, the fact that merchants can pay to have their names placed higher on the list is not disclosed. Nevertheless, spokespersons for the sites insist that they are unbiased. Dealtime and mySimon both have features that allow consumers to override the site's ranking and sort by price instead.

SEND OUT THE SEARCH PARTY

Of all the shopping services, Storerunner is the only one that offers searches of land-based merchants located near you. Perhaps it's too early to judge since the site launched just this past October, but the local listings appear to be quite limited in contrast to the expectations set up by the site's advertising. A search for a women's athletic-shoe in the mid-sized Florida town of Sarasota yielded just one item we could buy: a New Balance shoe at JC Penney for $120.00. Scott Savage, Storerunner's vice president of sales, said local sales reps for CBS Broadcasting, which is a Storerunner partner, are busy trying to populate the local listings with more merchants.

Storerunner's search engine also needs tweaking. When we input our Dylan request, we got a few comparison prices for the Dylan album (not the cheapest, however, at $10.77-$11.48.) Then, the music selection got tangled up in Doo - Scooby Doo Snack Tracks, that is, which could have been ours for $11.88. A Blood, Sweat and Tears disc and several other unknown-to-us musical selections also came up in our Dylan search.