What Google has in Store for You

SearchDay - Online Shopping with Google's Froogle - 12 December 2002
Google has launched a beta version of a new shopping search tool called "Froogle" that the company claims is the most comprehensive product search engine available on the web.

Froogle is organized as a directory, with 15 different product categories. These categories include Apparel & Accessories, Arts & Entertainment, Auto & Vehicles, Baby, Books, Music & Video, Computers, Electronics, Flowers, Food & Gourmet, Health & Personal Care, Home & Garden, Office, Sports & Outdoors and Toys & Games.

Much like the Google Directory, you can look for products either by using a keyword search or by drilling down through a particular category and its subcategories. You can also limit your search to a specific category.

Search results are limited to one product per store. Each result displays a thumbnail image of the product to the left, with the product's name, price and description listed to the right of the thumbnail. The store where the product is available is also listed, along with a link to see all results related to your keyword that are available at that particular merchant.

Froogle's emphasis is on helping users find products, rather than providing product information, reviews, and other associated information found on other shopping search services.

Results are determined by an algorithm that's similar to Google's PageRank method used for determining ordinary web search results. There's no paid inclusion or any other way for merchants to influence the way their products are presented in results, says Rosenberg.

"Froogle shines particularly well with some of the more esoteric queries," said Jonathan Rosenberg, Google Vice President of Product Management. This is because Google has tried to build a one of the most extensive product search tools available on the web, going for both breadth and depth of coverage.

Data in Froogle comes from two sources," said Rosenberg. "Merchant feeds, and the rest is a crawl of web pages that identifies product offers."

Merchants provide product information to Froogle via FTP. Rosenberg says that Google encourages merchants to send updates frequently, to keep the information as fresh as possible.

Rosenberg says that unlike other shopping search services, Google has no plans to charge merchants to include their products in Froogle. Merchants can sign up to be included in Froogle by using the "Information for Merchants" link below. Email Google with details of your site, and they'll send you specific instructions for submitting a data feed in the required format.

Though it's similar to Google Catalogs search, Froogle is a completely different project that uses

Froogle
http://froogle.google.com/
Google's beta launch of its product search tool.

Froogle Information for Merchants
http://froogle.google.com/froogle/merchants.html
To have your store included in Froogle, follow these guidelines to submit a data feed to Google. Doing so will ensure that your entire product catalog is included in Froogle, and it will also allow you to control the freshness and accuracy of your product information.
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