Disclosed herein are technologies for providing recommendations as to particular products and/or services that are customer specific and general, based on customer preference and inquiry. The recommendations are provided as part of an online shopping system. In accordance with one aspect, an item query is received from a customer, and analyzed by a query analyzer to determine if the query is a general item query or a specific item query. A search may be performed for items based on the item query in an items database listing items offered for purchase. If the query is the general item query, customer preference is determined from results of the search. If the query is the specific item query, the items from the results of the search are grouped based on cost performance. The items of the search result are ranked and provided to the customer.