A brief introduction to Froogle.
Froogle is a price engine website that allows users to enter product queries. This Google affiliated price engine then returns lists of vendors selling the product, as well as basic pricing information.
Froogle is different from some price engines in that it neither charges any fees for listings, nor accepts payment for products to show up first. Also, it makes no commission on sales. Any company can submit product information and be included in the Froogle engine. It should be noted that advertising space is available for purchase to be displayed in Froogle in the form of an AdWords ad, similar to those in other parts of the Google network. (Afterall, its not a charity....even Froogle needs to pay the bills.) Searches can be sorted by relevance ("Best match") or by price (either ascending or descending). You can also search for items in specific online stores (assuming, of course, they have provided Froogle a data feed).
Froogle is organized as a directory, with around 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 more familiar Google Directory, you can look for products either by using a keyword search or through a particular category and its subcategories. You can also limit your search to a specific category to return a more fine-tuned result.
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. This is an excellent example of how a few products listed through a 3rd party market place can make customers aware of your fuller product catalog through a reference to your primary store platform.
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. Froogle search results are determined by an algorithm that's similar to Google's PageRank method used for determining your more "standard" web search results. An interesting aspect of Froogle is its lack of a paid inclusion or any other way for merchants to influence how their products are presented in the search results. Merchants provide product information to Froogle via FTP. Though some users might find a similarity to Google Catalogs search, Froogle is a completely different search engine project using different technologies. At last check, Google is not currently planning to integrate the two services any time soon.
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