During the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance Summit in San Francisco last month, Google officially announced their intention to enhance product search in their web search engine before the end of the year. This big move from Google will be visible in the next few weeks, and will substantially improve its entire product searching experience. At the moment if you are looking for a specific product you can submit a query to Google.com, Froogle or Google Base. Since most of web searches happen in Google.com, it makes sense for the search engine to integrate the results coming from Froogle and Google Base into the main search results.
Froogle was officially launched back in December 2002 and is Google's retail search engine, providing clear information on a specific product, and is particularly effective for price comparison and product reviews. The service is completely free, and Google does not charge either for product submission or commission from sales. Froogle's index allows the submission of content with associated attributes, such as price or location; Froogle submissions are also accepted into Google Base. As a result, Froogle has become a powerful online price comparison service.
Google Base, essentially a web-based database, was launched in November 2005, and is yet another free service from Google. Similar to Froogle, Google Base allows the free submission of content, although not necessary products, with associated attributes. Furthermore, Google Base is open to submission from individuals and organisations alike. Froogle is now a subset of Google Base; provided that quality control guidelines are met, any user can post any item to Google Base. Google Base houses everything from jobs to recipes, as well as biographies, property, news, blogs, coupons, tickets, housing, events, reviews, etc
For submissions of information via the web form, there is a maximum limit of up to 15 digital files in the following formats: PDF (.pdf), Microsoft Excel (.xls), Text (.txt), HTML (.html), Rich Text Format (.rtf), Word Perfect (.wpd), ASCII, Unicode and XML.
All the items submitted to Google Base will appear in Google, Froogle and Google Maps if applicable. Google Base is also RSS friendly and your content therefore will benefit from syndication.
- But what can we expect from this new version of Froogle?
Google will be able to recognize whether or not your query is a product related search, and it will open a second page offering product results based in Google Base listings. Users will be able to refine the search if required via a new web search menu.
The main benefit from this new service is that it provides an integrated framework for product search; users will also be able to refine results without reloading the entire page. Moreover, the information is more clearly presented; but unfortunately there is a heavy AJAX presence, which may create some difficulties in tracking the ROI from taking the time to ensure inclusion in this service.
