Froogle
According to this SearchEngineWatch.com article by Chris Sherman, Google launched Froogle as a free shopping engine back in December of 2002.
Froogle is organized as a directory, with 15 different product categories. These categories include Apparel & Accessories, Arts & Entertainment, Auto & Vehicles, Baby, Books, Music & Video, Computers, Electronics, Flowers, Food & Gourmet, Health & Personal Care, Home & Garden, Office, Sports & Outdoors and Toys & Games.
“Froogle shines particularly well with some of the more esoteric queries,” said Jonathan Rosenberg, Google Vice President of Product Management. This is because Google has tried to build a one of the most extensive product search tools available on the web, going for both breadth and depth of coverage.
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, says Rosenberg.
“Data in Froogle comes from two sources,” said Rosenberg. “Merchant feeds, and the rest is a crawl of web pages that identifies product offers.”
Froogle was an early ecommerce move for Google, working with merchants like Overstock to understand retail. Froogle really didn’t take off like many of Google’s services. Many reporters therefore called Froogle a failure. I wouldn’t call Froogle a failure, I’d call Froogle a test. A really slow, long test. As far as I know, this was the first time Google took in data feeds from merchants for any purpose. That’s a big change.
So why didn’t Froogle ‘take off’ as some would expect? The main rumor I heard throughout the years was that one of the two Google founders liked the idea of Froogle while the other founder didn’t. Without unanimous support, there wasn’t really a serious effort to improve the service.
I interviewed a PR rep about Froogle in September 2005. They were definitely very closed way back when.
But by the holiday shopping season of 2005, while reporters were still not sold on Froogle, the shopping site was starting to drive traffic for merchants. As one merchant commented on ComparisonEngines in January 2006:
I work for a large online consumer electronics retailer. If our experience this holiday season is typical, then your recommendation to focus on other Shopping Engines over Froogle is SUICIDE!
Shopping engines raised their price by 67% over the last year. They are driving significantly more traffic, but the quality of their traffic is SIGNIFICANTLY worse.
In fact, our shopping engine conversion rate was down by 35% and the average order is almost $40 lower than last year. So our costs doubled and sales declined!
Compare this to Froogle, where traffic was up 40%, conversion was up 10% and sales were up 55%.
And the great thing was that Froogle was free, a complete departure from the other shopping engines on the web. I was starting to see the light…along with many other merchants on the web.
Froogle was both the way to submit products as well as the shopping engine. In November 2005, Google launched Google Base to accept data feeds which would be used to power Froogle (as well as other types of vertical searches on Google Base). If you’re getting confused, you’re not alone. Everyone was confused. You can read Google’s first newsletter to merchants about Google Base over at ComparisonEngines.com.
While the name of the official submission method changed, what’s more important is that Google started to change the way merchants thought about their data. They started to talk a lot about attributes. And what’s really cool is that Google started to allow some flexibility of attributes, basically admitting that it didn’t know everything about every product. The merchant was the expert. None of the established shopping engines (NexTag, Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, etc.) allowed for this type of data feed customization.
We’ve also expanded our product feed format to include some new standard fields (now called attributes). You can specify everything from quantity and unit price to accepted forms of payment and even define your own attributes. If you have product information that doesn’t fit into one of our defined attributes.
I was critical of Froogle and Google Base back in December of 2005, writing a series of posts: Froogle Spam, Froogle Leftover Spam, and Cleaning up Froogle – One Post at a Time. But Froogle kept moving in the right direction.
In 2007, Google ditched the name Froogle and replaced it with Google Product Search. Google was getting smarter about branding. While Froogle was a cute name, Google Product Search aligned the shopping site’s name with many other Google services. And it was around this time that Google started to commit resources to further developing its shopping site.
