It's a shopping Web site that gathers information for comparison shopping purposes on the Internet. It tells you all sorts of information about products, including who's selling them, for what price, whether they charge for shipping, how long it will take to ship and whether they can get it to you in time for Christmas morning.

If you get migraines whenever someone talks to you about technology, think of the aggregator as simply your shopaholic friend — the one who knows every product in every store in the known universe.

This holiday season, shopping experts say, Internet shoppers are cozying up to online aggregators like never before in a ruthless search for online bargains.

They're also hitting the Web harder, too.

A survey by Goldman, Sachs & Co., Harris Interactive and Nielsen/NetRatings last month showed that 67 percent of 800 online shoppers surveyed reported they've already visited an e-commerce site, up from 60 percent during the same week last year.

"This year we're seeing people begin their online holiday shopping earlier," said Lori Iventosch-James, director of e-commerce research for Harris Interactive.

Nearly one-third of consumers are planning on spending more online this year, and 45 percent plan to do a greater percentage of their holiday shopping on the Internet than last year, according to a survey by Shop.org, an association of online retailers, and BizRate.com, one of those aforementioned aggregators.

The organizations interviewed 3,207 online buyers and more than 90 online retailers.

U.S. online sales for all of this year will reach $100 billion, with holiday e-commerce growing by 42 percent over last year to $12.2 billion, according to Forrester Research, a Cambridge, Mass.-based technology research and consulting company.

BizRate.com forecasts U.S. consumers will spend $18.35 billion for the holidays, a 22 percent increase over last year.

But people aren't just throwing their money blindly at the Web.

"What we're noticing is they are searching for deals," BizRate.com spokeswoman Helen Malani said.

According to BizRate.com, which monitors 26 million product offers from more than 39,000 online stores, 48 percent of online shoppers reported they started at aggregator sites instead of a specific merchant.

Aggregator sites have been around for a few years, but people brave enough to shop online usually made a beeline to their favorite Web sites instead. Those sites already have their credit card information, which makes it convenient, and if shoppers had a good experience there, it eased fears about fraud or bungled orders.

Now that shopping on the Internet is so mainstream that even Wal-Mart sells there, people are experimenting with aggregators like BizRate.com, Shopping.com and PriceGrabber.com in search of the best deal.

Web portals like Yahoo offer similar comparison tools and search engines are toying with shopping, too — the supremely popular Google is experimenting with a site it calls "Froogle" (froogle.google.com) that breaks shopping down into categories like apparel and accessories, business, electronics and even food & gourmet.

All this has perked up online retailers.

According to the the Shop.org/BizRate survey, 62 percent of online retailers reported revenue jumped more than 25 percent higher than last year at this time, and almost a quarter of retailers enjoyed more than 80 percent growth.

Many popular e-tailers, like Richfield-based Best Buy (www.bestbuy.com), revamped their Web sites to make them easier to shop this season.

Best Buy wouldn't reveal its online sales figures.

"Indicators are that sales from our dot-com business will be stronger than last year," spokeswoman Sue Busch said.

But e-tailers are getting more aggressive promoting their wares through e-mail and other online devices, said Al Galgano, vice president of investor relations for Digital River, an Eden Prairie, Minn., online retailing technology firm that runs the Internet stores.