What is Froogle?

By Jakob Jelling
Posted Thursday, September 16, 2004

Keeping in touch with other sites like Amazon.com, Buy.com and Yahoo.com, Google created a new shopping search tool called “Froogle”. It has been called one of the most innovative price conscious tools on the Internet. Using the same technologies of Google.com, Froogle employs direct data received from merchants and through web crawls alone. Depending on the successes of the beta testing phase will provide adequate information as to whether Google continues with Froogle.

Housing over 15 different products and categories ranging anywhere from electronics, computers, food and gourmet, health care products, books, music and video, sports & outdoor equipment as well as toys and games, the list will only continue to grow in the coming months. Its searching capabilities mirror its mother page; it can be found at froogle.google.com and items can be found either in their product categories or by a dynamic keyword search. The results published are limited to one item per store. Every item appears with a thumbnail attached as well as a detailed product description, which includes price. Google doesn’t bias any website and often you will find products that exist on Amazon and Yahoo. This approach mirrors the Google philosophy of less details, more products.

The remaining products are crawled throughout the Internet as most other keywords are sought. Currently merchants can setup their accounts and sell on Froogle right away! There is no cost or cost per click through associated with adding your products to Froogle. Merchants can sign up for free and monitor how Froogle displays their product. This technology is open to the public at no initial cost or commissions.

Depending on how many items your company may want to sell on Froogle; you have to create a data feed file, which can be done with any spreadsheet software or by a text file. The opportunity to get involved with Froogle is incredible; chances are if you are selling a product and are optimized on the Internet for Google, your product may already exist.

About the Author
Jakob Jelling is the founder of (http://www.sitetube.com). Visit his website for the latest on planning, building, promoting and maintaining websites.