Froogle Local price comparisons
I noticed that the googleblog had a note today about some improvements to Froogle that have been rolled out. I have noticed recently that some products were “clustered” with price descriptions of (from $22-$49) or something, which when clicked would show you the exact same item at multiple places (more targeted than just a search for a product name.) The real evolution of it is local…
So, now they’ve integrated some of their Google Local search capabilities, so you can search for retailers selling products near you in addition to the traditional online search. I think this is a welcome improvement, you can arrange by price, distance, etc. It would be nice if you could give several priorities in sorting, but it may be possible to refine things further. *(sort by price, within 5 dollars AND distance from 5-10 miles, if it’s more than $5 cheaper within $20 miles… anyway…
I wonder if we’ll see retail places really hating to see people with pda-web access in their stores… Of course, it’s worth noting that price isn’t always the main competition point, but it frequently is most notable for identical products.
Along those lines…. I found sell on froogle, a Google page explaining how to submit items to froogle for listing. I hadn’t run across this information before and think it’s interesting, sounds like Google Base (basically if you’ll pardon the pun…) Uploading your listings are free. I know of at least one local shop uploading item lists to google, I’m sure more will soon follow. Ultimately though, it would be nice to see some sort of standard way of hosting this kind of summary in plain text on a website, then having SEVERAL competing indexing services (google/???) slurp the file on a regular basis for updates.
Anyway, in other google news… I’ve looked back in on my analytics profile, updated information is there through the 22nd (it’s 12:06AM on the 23rd now) I don’t have time to check and see if it’s complete for the 22nd, but it looks like it may be close, so they do seem to be catching up. There doesn’t seem to be any data on the 4th website I’m tracking there, I may have to revisit if that keeps up and figure out why it’s failing. In this vein…. It looks as though google searches account for between 80%-85% of ALL search-related traffic to the two higher traffic sites. The second spot is split between the two sites, one site boasts Yahoo with ~11% as the second highest search referrer, the other boasts MSN at ~9%…
Now, I like a lot of the products Google offers, but I’d LOVE to see more competition for them.