Froogle

Googles Froogle Shopping search goes Beta

[feeder]

[froogle.google.com...]

[Marcia]

Rodney, I tried Froogle but didn't find it, not even close. Regular search has a lot for miva modules, though - some free, though I remember that as being $39. I don't actually work on the Miva site itself, I just get it presentable for search engines.

[GilbertZ]

For news on the toolbar I had to uninstall the toolbar, reinstall and fix up the way my toolbars looked as they got all messed up, prefs lost.

[Grumpus]

"If you are a small online store that sells an item that happens to be sold by the big guys, this is a bad day for you."

Nah - I rank above the big guys in for many products in regular google. Now it's just a matter of working it out so that I rank well in Froogle, too. It's simple - find out what it's looking for, then give it to 'em.

G.

[GoogleGuy]

tyrojds, I do think that creative webmasters have an advantage with Google that they don't have with some other search engines. We return what we think are the most relevant results, so there's always more a webmaster can learn about how to make their site more crawlable and search-engine friendly. I've heard plenty of stories of smart "mom and pop" stores doing well in Google compared to larger players, and I wouldn't expect that to end with the introduction of Froogle.

GilbertZ: Sorry you had to redo your preferences. Hope you got it fixed like you like it now though. :)

[mahlon]

Found Froogle accidentally this morning and went right to WebmasterWorld to share my find only to see 117 posts already, wow!

I tried it out and I am sorry to say that the results were very disappointing! However the concept is nice.

I have thought about starting a thread titled,
"How To Optimize For Froogle" :)

Hopefully since this is beta the results will change, or how about submitting your e-commerce site to Froogle?

I'll pass on the Froogle blanket for now!

[edited by: mahlon at 5:26 pm (utc) on Dec. 12, 2002]

[Rodney]

tyrojds, froogle is still in Beta. Just because you are not there now, doesn't mean you won't be there. This gives you another opportunity to play up there with the big boys.

Just submit your datafeed to them and work with them during the beta, offering suggestions and hopefully you'll included as well.

--
Rodney

[stuntdubl]

Looks great Google Guy. I am excited to try it. I just submitted a request for the data feed instructions, and since my two sites have yahoo stores it should be very easy to get the proper datafiles.

I think Google has realized that there can be a balance of "doing the right thing", and still be a strong competitive business. Most businesses think cutthroat is the answer. I hope that Google always maintains it's altruistic attitude toward doing the right thing and doing it best. I believe that Google's humble attitude is what will keep them on top for year's to come.

"It is far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help."
--Judith S. Martin

[amoore]

I wonder if ebay will let google put their auctions in there. They currently keep all spiders out of the auctions listings, but a private feed of the data could bring in tons of traffic. Freshness would be a real problem, though, I guess.

[Rodney]

I don't think ebay auctions would work with froogle. On the info page, it says you need to have fixed price products to be included in froogle.

--
Rodney

[qball0213]

Glad it's still in beta, just saw a windows xp book going for 764 million, like to get the commission on that!

[mahlon]

off topic sorry

They (ebay) currently keep all spiders out of the auctions listings

I have seen ebay auctions in Germany get spidered and indexed!

[MeditationMan]

tyrojds:

My product also isn't on Google, but all you have to do is email the nice people there and they'll tell you how to get included.

Once we're in there we can then work out how to get listed better. I think this is a great new game! I'm excited that people will now have a search engine that will allow them to look for products.

[Lots0]

Has anyone noticed that a search for froogle on google will not get froogle just a freak out..

As some of you know I am not a big fan of Google’s - but I will wait and see for a while before I comment on this new development.

[tyrojds]

"I've heard plenty of stories of smart "mom and pop" stores doing well" -

very reassuring, GoogleGuy.

"always more a webmaster can learn" -

i'm the first to admit, especially when it comes to the occult world of seo, if ignorance was bliss i'd be giggling too hard to type. i'll keep pluggin'.

[jaeden]

From what I can tell this is going to force people how to search for products, here and on the normal Google search engine. Those people that are simply one word to maybe two keyword searchers are screwed. If you are looking for something to purchase through Froogle, then you are going to have to be VERY specific to get any relavent results.

GoogleGuy, the products we sell are pretty self explanitory, and only really have a short description (or title). IF there is a long description, it only included the dimensions of the items, or whether or not batteries are included, etc. Does Froogle care whether or not the items are really descriptive?

Also, we have about 5000 products or so... Will Froogle really want all of them, or should we scale down?

[jaeden]

GoogleGuy, I read that only the actual sites that sell the products should be included in the Froogle listing, and not affiliate sites. Well, I've already found two affiliates of our main competitor in the listings.

If Google really only wants the actual online stores in the catalog, then how is Google going to be able to handle situations like I've mentioned? No offense to you affiliate sites out there, but I've got enough competition in the Google engine. One of my competitors has over 500+ affiliates. I have none. I would like at least a fair shot in this new arena.

[bokesch]

I don't like this at all. I did a search for a used Cure CD and it came up with all sorts of garbage. Amazon seems to be more precise.

[Mario11779]

As a retailer of about 3000 different products online, I think this great thing for the business of the web. In search results we have to compete with affiliate sites, and that's fine.. But why should the people who have to pay the bills (warehouse, employees, utilities etc..) have somewhere where they can compete only against each other. I understand that some affiliate sites do provide great content, but those who have a capital investment in their sites and business (those that fuel the economy) deserve their own little corner (or big in Google/Froogle's case) on the web. As the "internet guy" at our firm it has typically been hard to explain to our partners how sites that don't actually sell anything can sometimes end up with higher rankings than us on certain keywords. This is a win situation for businesses everywhere (just not out of the U.S. for now).

The only thing I can suggest is what has been already suggested here.. Make it easier to sort the product results. I submitted a request to Google this morning to get the information regarding submitting a feed. I received an auto-reply that they would get me the info soon. GG.. Any idea how long this will take. I want to let my guys know if there is overtime this weekend!

Best of luck to Google on it's latest and greatest venture.

Oh, to all of you who are doubting Google's integrity regarding becoming an affiliate.. I have yet to see Google lie to us in the past and doubt they will start now.

[celerityfm]

GG Thanks for the reply :)

Qball0201 pointed this out, but I think it is indeed funny, when I did a search for "Windows XP book" the 10th or so listing was a book for $764536257.00 , which is actually the ISBN for the book 0764536257. (The book is $14.99).

[Lots0]

I have yet to see Google lie to us in the past and doubt they will start now.

LOL...

[born2drv]

I wonder if Google will implement some more advanced search features for each type of product or sub-category? For example, searching for all digital cameras in 0-1 megapixels, 1-3, 3+, etc. Or golf clubs by brand name, something like that.

[Liane]

I don't like this at all. I did a search for a used Cure CD and it came up with all sorts of garbage. Amazon seems to be more precise.

Froogle is in the Beta stages just now. Give them a chance. I am certain that with Google technology, and the concern they have for providing relevant results, everything will fall into place. My bet is that Froogle will blow the doors off the other sites offering the same sort of thing. :)

Give it some time.

[ciml]

Well, I've been playing with it today and I do like it. Seeing as creative webmasters have an advantage with Google that they don't have with some other search engines I guess there'll be an FEO industry soon.

One thing I'm not keen on:

All the world's products in one place.

Hopefully that's just premature; I don't think it's a fair description yet.

[Mario11779]

LOL...

What's so funny about that? Have they lied to you in the past?

[Napoleon]

I certainly see this as further orientation against the small guy. More barriers and hoops to jump to get products in front of the customers are never a good thing.

I stand to be corrected... but I expect the 'data feed' to be convoluted and difficult for the sole trader to address.

I've emailed Google on this, but no response so far.

My personal scenario, in which I own a handful of products, is that my credit card payment mechanism is bespoke, sort of. I use ShareIT for some, and a home written one for others.

None of these products show up so far... even though the web sites are US based and the products are all purchased exclusively in dollars.

I await with interest their response... but I expect to hear the worst.

The window of equality of opportunity closes alittle further.

[Mario11779]

FEO

Now that's funny!
LOL.

[sun818]

You know pricegrabber.com is able to give you a total shipped price based on your zip code. If Google implemented something similar it would be a more useful service. At the same time, I think this might cut out some of smaller businesses that may not have the resources or programming ability to provide such a feed.

[edited by: sun818 at 6:46 pm (utc) on Dec. 12, 2002]

[nipear]

Looking at this I see a few problems.

Price vs. Price w/ Shipping. - The classic ebay auction bait and switch. But with ebay all products are in the same site, with Froogle you really don't know what shipping will be until you try to order. It will be very simple for merchants to lower prices and bump up shipping. I think this is going to be a huge hurdle for this service to be widely accepted.

As a small merchant I think this has the ability to be a great service, espcially with the free data feed. It just depends how google ranks sites, and products. Right now looking at a few searches they are dominated by target, sears, REI. In other words the biggest merchants....

[GoogleGuy]

born2drv, personally I think that would be very cool. I wouldn't expect that anytime soon though. :)

MeditationMan and Mario11779, I think you've got exactly the right take on things. mahlon: I think those German eBay pages that you see are probably affiliates rather than sites that crawled eBay. Not positive, but I've seen that much more often.

Napoleon, I've got a pretty high opinion of your abilities based on your posts--I have faith in you. I think (not positive) that the data feed is tab-delimited text, and data can be uploaded via FTP. I know the folks that worked on it wanted to make it easy to do data feeds.

[jaeden]

nipear,
In a world of ecommerce and the number one thing people bitch about is shipping, I highly doubt that any one site is going to raise their shipping prices because of this.