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I checked out "catalogcity" to see why they show up so well in froogle, if you click on one of the catagories on the left of catalogcitys site you end up with a very similar looking search bar to froogle...
it gives you the same selct by $ amount etc .
maybe the Altura people (catalogcity web developers) helped the Froogle team?
All my my products have been listed but do not rank near the top for my keyword, they do in google lets hope beta going to move towards the google PR .
Matt
Froogle points users to sites where they can buy actual products from the merchants that sell them. Therefore, to be eligible to submit a feed, you must sell products via your website and ship them to the buyer. If you sell services or custom products that do not have fixed prices, use your website only to promote an offline business, or are an affiliate marketing site, your site content may be crawled by and included in Google's web search, but it will not be included in Froogle. Nor will Froogle accept a data feed under these conditions.
My site sells a service that varies in price according to the options choosen! :(
What do the SERPs look like for your KWs?
I don't believe merchants offering products at the lowest prices will gain an unfair advantage from it, since Froogle results cannot be sorted by price, but only narrowed by price range.
Finally, i just wanted to share with the forum a suggestion I have submitted to froogle-support@google.com:
About the way Froogle is fed with product information, I think a good alternative to FTPing product catalogs or having Googlebot crawl and parse product pages could be to let merchants use special META tags on product pages, so that Froogle could extract product information from HTML content more easily. Something like:
<META NAME="Froogle-Product-Name" CONTENT="Red Widget">
<META NAME="Froogle-Product-Description" CONTENT="Very well-constructed red widget. Comes with a nice carrying bag.">
<META NAME="Froogle-Product-Price" CONTENT="15.00">
<META NAME="Froogle-Product-Currency" CONTENT="USD">
<META NAME="Froogle-Product-URL" CONTENT="http://www.widgetstore.com/products/red_widget.html">
<META NAME="Froogle-Product-Image-URL" CONTENT="http://www.widgetstore.com/images/red_widget.jpg">
<META NAME="Froogle-Merchant-Name" CONTENT="Widget Store">
<META NAME="Froogle-Merchant-URL" CONTENT="http://www.widgetstore.com/">
Of course, the main drawback of this method is the risk of misuse (wrong syntax) or abuse (deceptive descriptions, fake prices and so on) by merchants, but I guess Froogle should be able to compare the meta tag content with the actual page content and apply a spam filter where necessary. ;)
Please let me know what you think.
I talk to people everyday that do not know what Google is. They have a favorite search engine, and they never want to switch.
Some people will use Froggle and like it, some won't. Some people will use it once or twice and then forget that it exists.
As web professionals, we know what search tools are out there and how best to leverage them. Talk to the common folk, you be surprized how much, they don't have a clue on searching.
Im afraid we are all getting tunnel vision on this froogle thing.
Come back in a year, and tell me I was right on how Froggle had minimun impact on your business model.
After cooling down a bit I to realize that the majority of people will still just use Google. I order online allot and have never used a shopping portal, Yahoo shopping, or comparision sites and I'm very happy with the results that Google finds. Froogle will be just another tool to find products but will never replace the confidence people have by using Google directly.
am wondering to myself if Google is planning on dropping product searches from the Google search and just offering information searches on the main Google page?
This is a very good point, would sure like GG to answer this. Feel it would destroy Google and everyone's respect for it if this occured. Sites which offer product reviews would be finished.
This is a very good point, would sure like GG to answer this. Feel it would destroy Google and everyone's respect for it if this occured. Sites which offer product reviews would be finished.
Whose respect? The respect of merchants, or the respect of the users who make up Google's target audience? Merchants might gnash their teeth over such a change, but most users probably wouldn't mind having separate indexes if they knew they could click the "Google" button for information and the "Froogle" button for shopping.
About sites that offer product reviews:
1) A content site with product reviews, such as dpreview.com, would still be in Google's main index.
2) Both Google and Froogle index pages, not sites. Why couldn't a commercial site like REI have a "how to choose an ice axe" article in Google and a catalog page for ice axes in Froogle? (The "how to choose an ice axe" article could still link to the catalog page for ice axes.)
To ensure that commercial sites' pages ended up in the right index, Google/Froogle could require pages that belonged in Froogle to include a meta="Froogle" tag in the header. Pages that got into Froogle would be excluded from Google, and vice versa. Or maybe Google could simply find a way to exclude pages with shopping-cart links from the main Google index, placing those pages in Froogle instead.
What do the SERPs look like for your KWs?
On most of my keywords I come up #1 or 2 on 1st page, on others the 2nd page.
The question I haven't seen asked is "Why is my site not included"? If Googlebot is effective it would have easily picked up on the 1000s of products in my website, which does very well on the regular search.
Is Froogle going to be just another form of Yahoo shopping (without the fees)...Google's beauty is in indexing the "innocent web" and not just the "engineered" web (or should I say SEOed web). And if you can only get into Froogle through Feeds, then the charm is lost. Googleguy, you taking notes?
I think webquotes is also appropriately timed and should do well combining with Froogle
most users probably wouldn't mind having separate indexes if they knew they could click the "Google" button for information and the "Froogle" button for shopping.
europeforvisitors, let's just suppose you're looking for information about a particular hard-to-find product, which only a handful of merchants sell online; those merchants' product pages also happen to be the only available online source of information about the product you are interested in. So, which button are you going to click then?
Sometimes online stores are also great information sources. Think of Amazon! So, where exactly should we draw the line between "commercial" and "informative" content?
I believe that Google should (and will) keep indexing all kinds of web content, regardlessly of their commercial or non-commercial character. Froogle will simply complement Google's index with a product index, just like Google Image Search complements Google Web Search: there's no reason why Google should exclude product pages (or image alt tags...) from its regular SERPs, because both can have informative value to searchers.
I believe that Google should (and will) keep indexing all kinds of web content, regardlessly of their commercial or non-commercial character. Froogle will simply complement Google's index with a product index...
You may well be right. I was simply responding to mikeD's comments that "it would destroy Google and everyone's respect for it if this occured" and "Sites which offer product reviews would be finished."
Still, removing product-catalog pages from the main index might help to reduce SERP clutter--although I will concede that, in some categories, Google is doing a pretty good job of minimizing such clutter by pushing information pages to the top of the SERPs. (I just searched on a certain model of digital camera, and--to my pleasant surprise--the top listings were for the manufacturer's product page and various digital-camera review sites.)
What I'd really like to know is whether Google will create a Froogle-style index for travel. With travel being the #1 e-commerce category, a Google travel index could be very popular.
Chris
At the bottom of the Google search page you have:
Dissatisfied with your search results? Help us improve.
I was just looking for a product (to buy, not to test Froogle :) ) and found two out of five listings had wrong prices (pulled off an adjacent item). I would have been very happy to send your developers a note.
Any word on how long it is taking to get an e-mail response from the data-feed folks? I imagine they are swamped by now.
First, it's limited to merchant sites, not affiliate sites. Yet we all know that some merchant sites are "affiliate sites" at least some of the time. Take Amazon.com: If you order from an Amazon page, the book may be shipped by Amazon...but it may also be shipped by a publisher or a third-party antiquarian book dealer, in which case it's really an "affiliate sale." So the differentiation between "merchant sites" and "affiliate sites" is artificial and, in some cases, deceptive.
Second--and of far greater importance--Froogle doesn't solve the problem of commercial clutter in searches for information, and vice versa. IMHO, it might be smarter (and more useful to readers) for Google to offer several search options:
1) "Information" filter ("I'm searching for articles and information on...")
2) "Commerce" filter ("I'm shopping for...")
3) No filter. ("Show me everything in your index for..")
This approach could be used for services as well as for products. Let's say that I wanted to read reviews, articles, and hotels' own Web sites to learn about Paris hotels. I'd use the information filter. Now let's say that I wanted to look for the best rates and reserve a room. I'd use the commerce filter. And I'd still have the option of using no filter to dig through the entire index with no distinction between commerce and information.
Obviously, this approach would require Google to distinguish between "commercial" and "information" pages. But it's already doing that with Froogle, and more ambitiously at that.
Note: There's nothing new about the idea of distinguishing between "commercial" and "information." Library indexes and reference directories do it all the time, and it's a fundamental principle of print and broadcast media (or at least it was until shopping networks came along). As the Web gets bigger and readers have to dig deeper and deeper into search results to find what they're looking for, it makes a lot of sense to let them filter results by "commercial" and "information" categories if they so choose.
Obviously, this approach would require Google to distinguish between "commercial" and "information" pages. But it's already doing that with Froogle
No, it's not. Froogle is simply providing a product search engine: Froogle result pages are just lists of links to products for sale online, fullstop.
Don't get me wrong EFV, I totally agree on your concern about the blurred boundary between commercial and informational content on the Web: "editorial integrity" seems to have become a somewhat fuzzy concept these days. But I think Google has stood out pretty well when it comes to keeping sponsored links (i.e., ads) separate from editorial results and clearly identified as such.
Nevertheless, to further discern "commercial content" (BTW, what's your definition?) from "information" is too complex a task for a search engine, even for Google IMHO; and a useless one too (for reasons I already explained in a previous post [webmasterworld.com]).
But even letting aside opportunity considerations, how is a SE supposed to accomplish that? Filtering sites by TLD, perhaps? Stripping the 21,987,042 active .com domains (source [whois.sc]) off of Google's web index? LOL :) (Not to mention the fact that not every site on a .com domain is actually a commercial site, and vice versa...)
Froogle is simply providing a product search engine: Froogle result pages are just lists of links to products for sale online, fullstop.
Well, that's a good first step: Break out the product pages. (Which they've just done.)
As for the rest, that's for Google to figure out. :-) But if you go back and reread my last post, you'll see that I defined "commercial" pages as e-commerce pages (as in "I'm shopping for..." or "I want to book..."). Certainly there are cues that can help to identify e-commerce pages: shopping-cart links, certain types of affiliate links, certain keywords and keyphrases, etc.
Let's say, for example, that Google finds a 1,000-page site with a different Lodging.com or Commission Junction link on each page. That's a pretty good indication that the site is booking hotel rooms or selling individual products, and that it should be included in the "e-commerce" filter but not in the "information" filter.
OTOH, if Google finds a 1,000-page site with the same Lodging.com or Commission Junction link on each page, it can assume (with a high probability of being correct) that it's found an information site with an affiliate link that's merely being used in an advertising context. So, in this case, the pages should be included in the "information" filter but not in the "e-commerce" filter.
Please note that I'm not suggesting a distinction between editorial and advertising per se. It obviously isn't realistic to expect Google to distinguish between a Microsoft page on the wonders of Windows and a Microsoft page devoted to Windows support--or, for that matter, to distinguish between a Canon press release for a new camera and a review of that same camera at Photo.net. But Google should be capable of distinguishing between either of those pages and a catalog page for that camera at Adorama or B&H Photo Video. And while it might not be able to distinguish between a review of the Hotel Whatsit and the home page of Hotelwhatsit.com, it should be able to distinguish between either of those pages and a booking page at buds-1500-new-york-discount-hotels.com.
One could argue that providing "e-commerce" and "information" filters would be good not only for users, but also for sellers. Why? Because:
1) Most of the readers who clicked on the e-commerce button would be hot (or at least warm) prospects.
2) Sellers would have a better chance of rising to the top of search listings, since they wouldn't be competing with information sites on the e-commerce SERPs.
3) AdWords could be bought separately on the e-commerce, information, and full-index searches. Some sellers might have a strategy of bidding on e-commerce AdWords so they could capture the attention of hot prospects (especially if their pages didn't rank high in the SERPs), while others might prefer to grab readers' attention on the information or full-index SERPs.
It's more or less the same thing with AdWords: with other SEs, you can never be too sure whether you're browsing regular SERPs or sponsored links, but those who click on a Google AdWords ad generally know what they're doing --and most of the time they're looking for something to buy.
Still, I'm not too convinced that excluding e-commerce sites from Google's SERPs would be the right move from Google's point of view: the beauty of a search engine like Google is that its results have an extremely high precision without sacrificing completeness (which IR geeks call "recall"). So, there's absolutely no need for Google to break up its web index into separate and more specialized indexes: besides, that would mean the death of serendipity (how many searchers know exactly what they're looking for right from the start?).
For these reasons I believe that taking away online stores from web search results could be detrimental to Google's effectiveness and popularity, but hey, that's just my opionion.
IMHO, it might be smarter (and more useful to readers) for Google to offer several search options:1) "Information" filter ("I'm searching for articles and information on...")
2) "Commerce" filter ("I'm shopping for...")
3) No filter. ("Show me everything in your index for..")
That would be very cool, but the "unfiltered" option would have to be offered as default... and you know that searchers are terribly lazy. ;)
Unfortunately, everyone I've talked to has pronounced it "frog - el".
Use Google to search: Web, Images, Groups, Catalogs
Try your search on other sites: Amazon - AOL - eBay - MSN - Yahoo!
BizRate - DealTime - Epinions - mySimon
I'm not suggesting that Google take away e-commerce listings from the main index; I'm just suggesting that it offer searchers a choice of filters (or no filter, if the user prefers). Google is already getting ready to offer a "product search" filter (Froogle), so why not extend the concept if there's a market for it?
I don't know if is a market for such filters, of course, but I'm sure Google has researchers who can find out. :-)
I will try to sell my electronic product on it.
Hey there is a picture of a FROOGLE on the site that owned the URL before google...
[web.archive.org...]Very funny... I love the waving Froogle cartoon [web.archive.org]. :)
I wonder if the people who had registered froogle.com also own a registered trademark on the name Froogle. It would be like winning the lottery for them. ;)
Unfortunately, everyone I've talked to has pronounced it "frog - el".
Did you mean:.....froogle [google.com]
;)
