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In the meantime, if someone can post a few examples of urls using Miva, I'll ask our crawl ops group whether we can try to do better on those types of pages.
Hope that helps,
GoogleGuy
I searched on "(City name) travel" and found a listing for a map (with photo and price) from my site. Froogle obviously thought I was selling the map, but I wasn't--I was reviewing it, along with several others.
Then I searched on my name and found a couple of listings for my most recent book. No problem there--but I also found listings for pages that linked to my Web sites and happened to mention my name. (My Web sites aren't for sale, and I'm not, either!)
Still, it's a useful tool, and it's a great idea-starter for gifts, books, and such if you just enter a fairly broad topic and let Froogle toss a load of surprises into your lap.
I will pass that suggestion on though. Hopefully if people don't get what they expect, they'll be more specific, too.
Congrats GoogleGuy - very impressive move!
(1)
How about a "Rank from lowest to highest price / highest to lowest price" function for the results?
(2)
One thing Yahoo! Shopping has over Froogle is a means of factoring in customer ratings. This is one area where Google could make money _and_ add a new variable for determining relevancy.
The idea: charge merchants $X/month to be included in the "Froogle Customer Ratings" system. It would resemble a BizRate-type program where each customer was solicited for a post-receiving-order survey. The customer would rate the purchase experience on a scale from, say, 1 to 10. After a merchant had received enough customer ratings, their entries in Froogle would start displaying their customer rank value, and Froogle would be expected to factor that into results relevancy calculations.
Some problems: merchants would scream bloody murder about having to pay to be included this system, and there would be some risk of the appearance to consumers of Froogle's "selling out". Also, once implemented, some people would undoubtedly work overtime trying to rig the system, e.g., set up fictitious orders for the opportunity to send in bogus reviews.
This is one reason to charge for being in the system, so that Froogle can afford to spot-check the orders. No, you couldn't call up every customer to verify that the order was legit, but you could do it randomly and/or based on statistical flags ("Gee, they've only had 100 orders, but every single customer ranks them at 10..."). The threat of being dropped from the "Froogle Customer Ratings" system --or out-and-out banned-- would help Webmasters think twice about trying to game the system.
Some benefits: shopping search differs from regular search in that the person doing shopping search is necessarily anticipating spending money, so she's concerned with product availability, price, and, above all, not being scammed. Establishing a "Froogle Customer Ratings" system would address the scam fear.
There may be other ways to do this, too, but I think eventually customer feedback will have to be incorporated. (BTW, kudos on the front page Newsweek article, quite the milestone.)
[edited by: zechariah at 6:33 am (utc) on Dec. 12, 2002]
The reason I look for UK sites is simply because it's easier to buy things locally than pay for overseas postage and have to wait ages for delivery.
Other suggestions for what people would like to see?
64.68.86.122 - 80 GET /product.jpg - 200 www.mysite.com Googlebot/2.1+(+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
How about changing the UA to Frooglebot?
1. The sub-categorization of products below the first two levels isn't very good. More categories would be nice.
2. There are a lot of duplicate listings for a single company, even without the "See all results from www.widgets.com" I would really like to see a lot more diversity of companies for any listing.
3. The "Advanced Froogle Search" is really nice, and helpful.
4. Where is the "cache" feature? How about the "similar to" feature?
Overall, very very nice stuff.
One nights sleep and I've missed a whole new development.
Some questions:
- I guess Europeans need to get their stuff in US shops?
- Sometimes prices do not show up, so this is not a prerequisite?
- The green bar on the ads do not show up?
- Will there be/is there a Froogle.bot?
[GoogleGuy yawns]
Speaking of low melting point metals, is anybody else here sleepy? I'm gonna go nap for a bit. Catch y'all later--and I'm looking forward to hearing more good suggestions from you..
[edited by: GoogleGuy at 8:10 am (utc) on Dec. 12, 2002]
Its a long way off before this comes out of beta. I'm not hanging my hat on what I see NOW. Lots of time for study.
Anyone remember how long news search was in beta? It was like 6 months wasn't it?
Basically Froogle is like your Sunday's paper flyers - only the big stores are in there.
Maybe for your search terms, but I just searched for a specific digital camera I'm thinking about buying and was quite pleased to find LOTS of smaller stores with better prices than the few big guys that were in the listings.
How about a "Rank from lowest to highest price / highest to lowest price" function for the results?
Great call, Winooski -- that would be my #1 suggestion, too.
Thanks, GoogleGuy, for sticking around and answering so many questions.
When will the Froogle update start?
Miva has a module to shorten the URLs but I've not seen it used. Their URLs are atrocious and search engines do_not like them at all. I put the cart in robots.txt for exclusion and just forget the pages are there. Some web designers do only a flat index page and the whole rest of the site is those pages. Ugh! They should be kinder to the crawlers. Some Cold Fusion sites aren't much better.
This is what a Miva page looks like - exactly, except for the domain name not being used:
http://example.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv? Screen=CTGY &Store_Code=MMB &Category_Code=ODD
Individual product page:
http://example.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv? Screen=PROD&Store_Code=MMB &Product_Code=KR25B &Product_Count=0 &Category_Code=B
Longer yet with the www included. That is one sorry URL there :(
DaveN
I'm not trying to be a wise guy but hop over to the Overture search tool at [inventory.overture.com...] and enter the keyword 'pumps' and see the search terms a SEO would think people are looking for when doing a search for 'pumps'. Womens pumps, which I only assume are shoes, are 23rd on the list. Their second occurence is around 50th on the list.
Enter 'pumps' in the Froogle search window and you get nothing but women's shoes, and a book on women's shoes, on the first and second pages.
Finally, enter the word 'pumps' in the Google web search window and you'll see that the results are a lot closer to being 'on the money' than Froogle.
This example may give some insight into the power of optimiztion. SEO's lean toward pushing pages people are most likely to be searching for toward the top of the serps. It's a human weighting element that outshines any algorithm.
>>I guess Europeans need to get their stuff in US shops? <<
Yes, that's an interesting issue. Why the restriction?
Next question.... I have informational sites with one or two niche products sold on them... I would have thought ideal products for Froogle, as there are not too many alternatives around.
However, the credit card payment mechanism used is bespoke, sort of. I use ShareIT for some, and home written one for others.
None of these products show up... even though the web sites are US based and the products are in dollars.
Anyway forward with this for inclusion? Will the manual data-feed work?
Onc this thing takes off, people will start comparing prices.
How are you going to verify that the prices in the feed are the same as on the target site?
Will it be the same "turn your competitor in" thing, which probably is the most effective way?
September 11th 2001
Ring any bells?
I'd like to see Froogle becoming the shopping arm of Google properly. It would be great to take out all those shopping results from the main Google index and free up the bots to get more unique content from the web, because as other search engines show - maybe not with the same Google relevancy - there are some great sites out there that can't compete with a manufactured link pop of 20,000 and aren't commercial.
And besides...wasn't that what the web was about anyway!
:)
[edited by: GlynMusica at 10:37 am (utc) on Dec. 12, 2002]
How are you going to verify that the prices in the feed are the same as on the target site?
Anyway, I think Froogle may become a severe problem for web sites like mine, which gathers visitors thanks to good and independent -not like some other "brand influended" sites- content (product reviews, opinions, news, forums... updated every day and always improving) but it's only profitable thanks to affiliation programs to online retailers which in a future may think it's more profitable to appear only in Froogle.
My only hope would be Froogle not to focus in regional European markets for a long time.
Bad news (I think) for us :(
The answer to which will be a measure of Google's regard (or lack of it) for small independents.
