FindTheBest, which was recently backed by Kleiner Perkins' sFund, launched in August of 2010 and is now attracting 1.5 million monthly visitors, according to Kevin O'Connor, who founded DoubleClick in the mid-90's, and recently sat down with me for a four-part interview.

The new service is a place to compare a multitude of attributes across 500 categories, from venture capitalists, dog groomers, smartphones to ski resorts. What Kayak did for the travel search-engine space, FindTheBest wants to do with hundreds of categories, said Kevin.

In this interview, Kevin talks about why FindTheBest decided to tackle 500 categories vs one or a few. I also ask him which verticals are working the best and his strategy to work with publishers. In this interview, the first of our four-part series, we also talk about how FindTheBest is different from the first-generation search engines, such as Shopping.com, NexTag and PriceGrabber. We also talk about what kind of larger companies could be a good partnership fit to accelerate FindTheBest's business.

Stay tuned for our upcoming interviews, in which Kevin talks about how he plans to curate the content, distribute the content and how FindTheBest plans to make money.

It's been a while since we've seen new approaches to comparison-shopping engines. But we did see a bunch back in 2005. Just for fun, you might be interested in taking a look back at what I wrote in 2005 about the first wave of comparison-shopping engines.