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13 December 2002

Google Launches Shopping Search

Just in time for Christmas, Google has launched a BETA version of their latest invention, Froogle™, a shopping search engine.

Taking its name from a clever combination of "frugle" and "Google", Froogle acts like an online product catalog, responding to user searches for particular products by listing web sites that sell the item, a product description, approximate prices and a thumbnail picture of the item in question.

According to Jonathan Rosenberg, Google Vice President of Product Management,

"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".

In the same interview with SearchDay about the launch, Rosenberg commented that Froogle data comes from two sources: merchant feeds and Google's own database of crawled web pages.

Google claims that Froogle works best for "esoteric queries". I tested this theory with a search for "chocolate covered pandas", but the two matches returned were not particularly relevant. I guess I shouldn't be too disappointed. It is still in BETA after all.

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