Google Goes Froogle

Just in time for Christmas, Google's created a shopping directory. Froogle ( http://froogle.google.com/froogle ) is in beta.

The site is set up like your standard searchable subject index. Choose a category and "drill down" by subcategory until you get to a list of products. Now it gets different. In Froogle Home > Home & Garden > Lawn & Garden > Plants & Seeds there are over 4000 products, and I'm shown the first ten. I have the option of narrowing down the search by price, or seeing all the results in each store. Listings include a picture of the product when available, a price, a URL for the store, and a brief description. It's not clear how the products are listed, but I suspect as more people use it we might start seeing those green popularity bars like we do with the Google Directory.

With so many listings, you've got to use the search. You can search in the entire directory or in individual categories. Once you've gotten the results (and you're going to have to get really specific; a search for "copier" found over 144,000 results) you can narrow down your result by category or narrow by price. An advanced search lets you narrow by price, by the occurrence of the word in product title or description, and by category?

Special syntaxes? Yes, we have special syntaxes. Intitle: restricts results to the title of the item, while intext: restricts results to the description. You can use these together, so intitle:giraffe intext:figurine will work. You can also use OR; glass (intitle:giraffe | intitle:elephant) is a legitimate search. I have no idea why you'd build complicated queries for shopping, but hey.

Currently Froogle only accepts English-language Websites and products priced in US dollars. Merchants who wish to be included on the site are invited to submit a data feed; inclusion is free. You can get more information on inclusion in the engine at http://froogle.google.com/froogle/merchants.html .

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