[Sigia-l] Froogle

[Noreen Whysel]

I just did a search for a line of French children's clothing that is the 
rage at my preschool.  It brought up a page of a company with a prominent Y! 
Shopping link in it's left nav bar.  Funny.
But it got me thinking about Yahoo!s relationship with Google (aren't they 
still using Google's technology for web searches, or am I behind the times?) 
and their now competing shopping sites.

I admit I do most of my site searching on Google and most of my Shopping 
searches on Yahoo!.  Interestingly, I do my shopping searches on Yahoo! with 
the same mindframe as general web searching on Google.  I want something in 
particular but don't know where to go or which store/site has the best 
information/product/deal/etc.  And I expect the respective searches to 
provide results that are ranked, and in the case of shopping, sortable by 
some criteria such as price, site, relevance, etc.

Citing the same French clothier search, I found 50 items on Froogle and 16 
on Yahoo!  Yahoo! lets me sort by store, relevance or price (increasing or 
decreasing), and allows me to narrow the search by price.  Google only 
narrows by price or category.  Google's category option is something I've 
wished Yahoo! had (really surprising since Yahoo! is the pioneer of category 
listings).

Google's ability to show just one item per store could be improved if they 
also showed how many other products were available within a particular 
vendor (like catalogcity.com does).  I know eBay isn't the same category, 
since they only display items listed on their site, but they also had a 
category search (which mimics Yahoo!s category search results), display by 
price (high or low) and listing and ending dates.  What is nice about eBay's 
category search is that they will show you the number of items listed by 
category and subcategory (similar to Yahoo!'s search results).  They also 
allow you to search by title or by title and description.

In the end, though, Yahoo's ability to let you make purchases from multiple 
vendors at one site is why I do my last ditch shopping there.

So has anyone tried Amazon's restaurant beta yet?

Noreen


>From: "Peter Morville" <morville at semanticstudios.com>
>To: <Sigia-l at asis.org>
>Subject: [Sigia-l] Froogle
>Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2002 14:00:50 -0500
>
>http://froogle.google.com/
>
>Would you like some froogle with your fragel?  Am I the only one who's
>feeling a bit over-saturated by the growing Googleplex?  Is Google
>destined to become the Microsoft of the Internet?  Or is Google all
>Good?
>
>
>Peter Morville
>President, Semantic Studios
>www.semanticstudios.com
>
>------------
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