Forum Moderators: open
Yes, they do allow merchants to provide a file feed, but they also crawl the web for products as well.
In this age of XML, supposed they were say "To be listed in Froogle, you must include these key fields in your HTML":
<name>Super Widget 2.0</name>
<price>$2.95</price>
<description>It slices! It dices! It's the all in one floor wax, dessert toping and cat nueterer in one!</description>
<manufacturer>Ronco</manufacturer>
Based on the clought that Google holds in the industry, I'm guessing most e-commerce sites would do it. Web browsers would ignore the tags and show the data, and Froogle could get the meta data it needs to make accurate retrievals.
That would revolutionalize price comparison shopping, no?
Im not up to speed with XML, but it would seem from your example that if Google said, "jump", most sites would say "how hi?".
From a business point of view it would be foolish for sites to ignore the custom they could get from such a search and from an information point of view it would be an excellent way to organise the information.
Another concept that could be introduced would be to remove retailer / ecommerce site branding. Just display the product. That would have quite an impact on customer loyalty, resales and the marketing activities of the sites themselves.
This would reduce the search to purely price comparison shopping - no place, no promotion - just price and product.
Ah, the times are a changin'! ;)
JOAT
ps where can i get the super widget 2.0? It seems incredably functional....
I was just thinking about Froogle, and how difficult it must be for them to parse HTML to find out what a product is, what it's price is, what photo to use, etc.
But by the same token why not just include those sites which have good / parsable HTML structure - thereby forcing those with poor HTML to either improve or get left out...
Too many people have problems with sorting out their pages at the moment, check out the relevant forums for examples of this - requiring them to add extra tags that their webpage programs cannot cope with wont help ease this confusion.
It makes more sense to give the common message of "create valid markup so that everything can view it" rather than "create tags just for us cos' we are special".
Also you have the issue that using non-standard tags would presumably make the HTML unable to be validated fully.
<added>
Of course the super widget 2.0 seems cheap... It's last year's model! :)
</added>
- Tony
I agree that valid markups have their merit, but I don't think that alone would help Froogle.
I could have a site with perfectly valid HTML or XHTML, but if it's got this text:
Widget 2.05 now only $2.95, you save $1.50!
How is Froogle going to know what the price of the object is? Is it $2.95 or is it $1.50? Maybe it's 2.05?
How will it know that "Widget 2.0" is the product name? It could be just "Widget".
Without the extra meta data that XML provides, you're just guessing...
I'd have to agree with jack of all trades in that you really shouldn't do things by half measures - if you want to have the flexibility of XML then create a dedicated XML feed rather than creating an ugly "hack" to HTML-style markup just to satisfy one engine - even if it is google.
With full XML you get a lot more options and abilities, plus the structure and data can be fully validated as XML (rather than as a series of extended tags in markup) and so you avoid people endlessly whining about whether or not their files can be read/interpretted correctly or not (as they do with robots.txt) - the XML either validates or it doesn't - if it can be validated it can be interpretted.
An XML feed based system allows you to create a standard which anything and anyone can use rather than adding yet more bloat to the markup standards, which if anything will cause more problems.
- Tony
