Nice advert, shame about the site (fish4.co.uk)

Member Name: mikeb

Product:	fish4.co.uk
Date:	17/02/01 (119 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Can search an "extensive" database from the comfort of your own home.

Disadvantages: Not convinced as to how extensive their database really is.

After seeing the TV advert for this site over and over again, I thought I’d check it out and do an op on it.

The homepage didn’t tell me alot about what I could use the site for so I decided to click on the About Fish4 link to start with. The new window that opened informed me that ”Fish4 is the new Internet brand of four market leading consumer websites – bringing together three major service sites and an on-line directory”. I don’t know about you, but I was still none the wiser after that. Reading on a bit further down the concept is explained a bit more. Apparently Fish4 was launched in October 1999 and is made up of four main parts:-

Fish4cars – A database of between 180,000 to 200,000 used cars for sale. This section also includes road tests on new and used cars, finance and insurance information.

Fish4jobs – A database of 25,000 to 30,000 UK jobs, mainly taken from newspapers that are members of Fish4. This membership is made up of six regional newspaper groups and
nine additional subcriber groups. This represents 80% of the UK’s regional press, which is 800 daily and weekly regional newspapers.


Fish4homes – A database of UK homes for sale but also including mortgage and estate agent infomation.

Fish4 - An online directory service featuring 1.9 million businesses.



This at least gave me a bit of an understanding of what Fish4 was about so I closed this window and went back to the homepage.


The left hand side of the screen has a drop down menu which you can use to navigate around the various categories in Fish4, however this is duplicated with clickable links directly below the drop down menu, which seemed a bit pointless to me. The categories are:-

Cars.
Jobs.
Homes.
Directory.
Local Sites.
Entertainment.
Shopping.
Travel.
There are also a
couple of links to contact the site and to view the available jobs on Fish4 itself.


The main section of the homepage had three large links to the main sections of Fish4cars, jobs and homes and four smaller links to other available services, which were Local Sites, Shopping, Business Directory and Travel. Apart from the obligatory advertising banner at the top of the screen, that’s about it for the frontpage of the Fish4 site, so on to the content.


Each of the three main categories of Fish4 work in roughly the same way. When you have chosen your category you are presented with a search box and must fill in some details so that Fish4 can search the relevant database for your requirements. I chose Fish4cars and decided to look for a newer model of my current car, a Suzuki Swift. There were 4 pieces of information required for this search –

Make of car - Suzuki.
Model – Swift.
County - Lincolnshire.
Min/Max price - £3,000/£6,000.

I could then either “Go Fish” or add more details. I hit the Go Fish button and after about 10 seconds the results were on screen. Well, not exactly. Fish4 could find no results that matched my exact search, which surprised me, and I was presented with another screen to fill in. The problem was that the boxes on this screen were even more detailed than the previous one, such as colour, petrol or diesel etc and was unlikely to be any more successful. I decided to widen the search and go for a similar car anywhere in the country and between £1,000 to £10,000. Surely this couldn’t fail to produce some results. One result to be precise and this was for a Swift motor caravan. Given that the hompage was showing that there were 147,786 cars (what happened to the 180,000 from the About Fish4 page?) in their database at this time, this was not a great result.

I thought the best option was to widen the search further and keep it simp
le so I chose a Ford Fiesta, anywhere and priced between £3,000 to £6,000. A great improvement, 288 matches returned, with the first 10 on screen and the option to go through the results page by page if I wished. Each car had a brief description, much like a newspaper advert, and contact details to get in touch with the seller. There were also links to a road test for the type of car which also gives the good and bad points of the model. You can also see how much it would cost to arrange finance for a car through Alliance and Leicester, get an insurance quote from several companies and a warranty arranged through Fish4 and Motor Warranty Direct. These additional sevices were probably the best feature of the Fish4cars section, but I dare say you can find them elsewhere on the web.


My first experience of using Fish4 was interesting but did not really convince me that this was going to become a site I would visit on a regular basis. The fact that they did not have a single car similar to my own anywhere on their database did little to convince me that they had an extensive range to choose from and put me off looking at their homes or jobs section, or any of their other services. If their adverts are a success and this leads to a massive expansion of their databases, I might be tempted to give it another go. At present I’ll stick to looking through the local rag and visiting garages/job centres/estate agents until I'm more convinced by the services they offer.

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