THE WEB'S MIDDLEMAN

Monday, Feb. 17, 1997 By MICHAEL KRANTZ

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So you're buying a car, and you can't afford to make a mistake. What do you do? Consult your friends and your Ouija board? Pore over newspapers and magazine ads? Endure dealership pitches and test drives? Lie awake at night worried you'll screw up? All of the above?

Wouldn't it be nice if instead an automotive expert asked you a series of questions and used your answers to winnow down the field to a few dream machines? And used the same format to help you decide how to finance the purchase? And did this all in an hour, free?

Barry Diller sure thinks so. Two long years after the architect of the Fox Network departed his perch at QVC for exile in the Media Mogul Wilderness, the poker-faced, once-and-future content king is ready to reveal his latest card. It is Consumer's Edge, a software developer based in La Jolla, California, that hopes to earn a slice of the online commerce pie by offering what CEO Steve Tomlin calls "deep interviews"--extensive Q&As that match consumers with pretty much any product known to the free market.

Log on to the Consumer's Edge Website when it launches next month, and click on the car channel, for instance. The program informs you that there are 746 possible cars. Then it starts asking questions: How much do you want to spend? What styles do you like? How much space do you need? How important is power? Safety? Legroom? Air conditioning? Sun roof? Cup holders? Valve configuration?

And so on, in as much--or as little--detail as you desire. The answers aren't just yes or no; you can express gradations of preference by using your mouse to slide a dial to the left or right--I like antilock brakes this much. You can revise your answers as you go along. At last the program reduces the field to a small number of appropriate cars. Then you click on a page devoted to each lucky car, where you find a buying guide, customer reviews and perhaps a sales offer from the company that made it.

That's where things get really interesting. The Web was supposed to eliminate the great American middleman (not to mention the great American middleman's markup), but it is merely changing his nature. Those Industrial Age intermediaries between consumer and manufacturer--the auto dealer, the record-shop owner, the stockbroker--are giving way to their Information Age equivalents, whose raison d'etre is to help consumers navigate the Web's bewildering oceans of data.

A Forrester Research report calls these new electronic agents "content-focused matchmakers" (CFMs) and says they must solve three consumer problems: a) a huge selection of products (it's hard to decide what to buy); b) large numbers of vendors (it's hard to decide whom to buy it from); and c) infrequent purchases (you need lots of info that you're going to use only once, which makes it hard to deliver this info cost-effectively). The deep-interview concept, says Tomlin, is based on the belief that "the future was unlimited choice across the Web, and this was going to be an unmitigated mess."