The New Yahoo!, Google, MSN Et Al. Battleground

A reader writes: "Kelkoo sold to Yahoo for 575 million dollars!" That, in and of itself is not that interesting - but combine that with Google's inclusion of Froogle into the front page, and things become more interesting. The comparison shopping field, including places like PriceGrabber (Disclaimer: OSDN is an affiliate of PriceGrabber) in the US, Kelkoo/Yahoo! overseas, Froogle, and MSN is heating up in competition. Now that search has been monetized, the next battleground for big money is in comparison shopping, beyond MySimon and other smaller ones.

Comments

who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

google's gonna win cause the other ones suck.

plus, its got far more name recognition, people using it as a verb and all...

its like 'kleenex' vs 'tissue paper' or 'xerox' vs 'facsimilie'

once you have that sort of name recognition, its damn hard to lose in the marketplace...

Re:who cares?

[iapetus]

Speaking as a denizen of the UK, Froogle sucks and Kelkoo is the clear winner.

What I'd actually like to see is a search engine that can tell which companies will ship to my home country, and work out the actual price of the product based on shipping, currency conversion and possibly import duties payable. That would be a lot more useful than a single-country search system, particularly when I don't live in that country.

Re:who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that facsimilie is typically used when talking about sending a fax, not making a copy...

Re:who cares?

[cshark]

We don't know that. Yahoo was king for several years. This recent sentament that google "owns" anything is stupid.

In any case, I think the real winners in this one are going to be those of us that figure out how to leverage these services for our online shops.

This is going to be a good holiday season :)

Re:who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

its like 'kleenex' vs 'tissue paper' or 'xerox' vs 'facsimilie'

once you have that sort of name recognition, its damn hard to lose in the marketplace...

That's a bad thing not a good thing. The brand Kleenex is so diluted now that it simply means tissue. How'd you like it if you owned Kleenex and then heard everyone call every tissue Kleenex? All those tissues are benefitting from your trademark and you get nothing in return. That's why Google fought Webster's to have the verb form of Google taken out of the dictionary. They want to protect their trademark; not give it away to the public.

Re:who cares?

[Neophytus]

if it's anything like it was a couple of years ago i think pricewatch takes into account international shopping, but this could have changed

Re:who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

This recent sentament that google "owns" anything is stupid

Bender: "No, YOU shut up!"

Re:who cares?

[Schnapple]

I think the real reason that people are so pro-Google is because here is a search engine that works and makes life better. Search engines used to be these sorta-neato things that tried to help us find things but we had to work with and accept poor results. Google changed all of that - think of how many programmers run into an issue and Google Groups save their butter. Google made the web useful.

As a result, we're protective over Google. We don't want to see them become what came of Yahoo. We hope that, since now the dot-com bubble has burst, Google won't fall into the same traps as Yahoo and the failed search engines. That being said, if someone comes along tommorow hands-down better than Google we'll go there.

To the extreme, this is what Apple zealots do. When Apple does what other companies get criticized for, the Apple zealots defend them to the bitter end. Sometimes it's that they don't want to believe that Apple could be an evil company, other times it's that they don't have a predisposed blind rage towards the company (see: Microsoft) and are more able to see that sometimes a business decision is just that - a business decision.

Re:who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

As evidence of Microsoft's complete lack of credibility for search results, try searching on "warez" at msn vs. google.

At msn, the first page of results are anti-piracy sites.

Re:who cares?

[Phekko]

You mean sorta like once it was called 'IBM PC' ? No? Ok, maybe the way it used to be called a 'hoover' instead of a vacuum cleaner? You CAN lose that kind of name recognition. It just gives you quite an edge on the competition. Remember the days when everyone was using Netscape?

If you make bad decisions and your competition makes better ones, you'll end up losing someday. Look what happened in the war Intel vs AMD. Ofcourse you'll have quite a lead on the competition if you can spend, say, $10 BILLION making your product but nevertheless. If you keep making crap and the competition keeps on making a better product for a competitive price, you'll lose eventually. If you got heaps of money and a big propaganda machine like a certain Redmond company, that will probably be later, but at some point people will have had enough of buying crap for a high price when they don't really have to.

Getting back to the google-stuff for a while, I remember a time when altavista was the only search engine anyone wanted to use or at least pretty damn close.

Re:who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

So would the opposite be true? Can you take a common word and turn it into a "brand name"? (And yes, I'm thinking of the term "Windows")

Re:who cares?

[jeet]

In India we have Life Insurance Corporation.. Life Insurance is always reffered as LIC no matter you are getting done from which agency.. Surely when the brand name substitutes a verb it better for the brand name.

Re:who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

But with Kelkoo, when you search for "sony" in the "Television" category, you get TVs from Sony :-) You can't compare this with ordinary search engines because the results are more accurate.

Re:who cares?

[oberondarksoul]

While 'kleenex' may be rather ubiquitous, is it used as a verb? I've certainly never heard of it used like that.

As for 'Xerox', it's known of here in the UK, but is rarely (if ever) used as a verb. Google, on the other hand, certainly has been verbed and has entered common usage over here - even non-techies now know that it's the best available and seem to be incorporating it into their speech just like the /. crowd.

Re:who cares?

[dstarke]

Well, it isn't part of a search engine, but you can get import duty estimates if you enter your shipment information into the DHL Trade Automation Service.

You do need to set up an account to do this, and it's a little bit of work to put all your shipment information in, but it's better than being surprised by a large customs bill.

Re:who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

DOES NOT COMPUTE!

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=flee says:

1) To run away, as from trouble or danger: fled from the house into the night.
2) To pass swiftly away; vanish: "of time fleeing beneath him" (William Faulkner).

Re:who cares?

[BiggerIsBetter]

Yeh, it's not hard to figure shipping costs, but half the time US shops don't want to know about shipping goods abroad. Fair enough to some degree, as many won't know about filling in export entries and how to handle any taxation issues, plus the ever-present fraud paranoia, but it's still annoying to have to manually filter them out.

Re:who cares?

[canavan]

Groups.Google.com existed before google - under the name "DejaNews", until google bought them. The advanced search form still bears a lot of similarity to the original dejanews form, so this is nothing to thank google for. And, if you haven't noticed, almost all search results for things you can buy are filled to the brim with useless spam (at least here at google.de, which I cannot evade unless I abuse some open proxies). Google has started to suck badly, but I still consider it the best search engine for most things.

Re:who cares?

[allyourbasebelongtou]

Let's remember, there was a period when AV was king... there was also a period where HotBot (aka Inktomi) was a serious, serious contender. I remember very distinctly for a LONG period if I was looking for good technology stuff, (i.e. shopping or mailing list archives) I searched HotBot first.

I also remember what a great resource NorthernLight was for finding printed materials.

IMHO, in search it ain't over 'til the dust settles, and it never stays settled for long. :-)

Re:who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

And they also cut down on the features. With Deja(news) you could watch the threads that you had posted in.

Re:who cares?

[optikSmoke]

at least here at google.de, which I cannot evade unless I abuse some open proxies)

Really? Google.ca has a handy link at the bottom that says "go to google.com". I imagine google.de has the same link.

What I'd like to see in a shopping search engine

[prostoalex]

From what I understand, Froogle is very different from PriceGrabber, PriceWatch, BizRate, Yahoo! Shopping, MySimon, Nextag and others. You have to pay and provide the XML feed with your products to the search engine (or be a hosting customer of Yahoo! Stores to be listed in Yahoo! Shopping), so really in a nutshell those places are nothing more than databases, broken down into categories with database search enabled. The selection is limited.

Froogle, however, is purely search engine. Just like the Google Web search, you'll be in their database if you happen to sell something, your site has a dollar tag on it next to the product, and you're not hiding your products behind some obscure interface that search engine has no access to.

There's little technological value in PriceGrabber, PriceWatch, BizRate, DealTime, Yahoo! Shopping and others, but there's technology involved with Froogle that gives you much broader choice of vendors.

What I would like to see, although I'd admit it might be asking for too much. But you know those places that give you cashback if you shop online with them? Basically they get the affiliate comissions and then pay you back as part of the deal. eBates and FatCash are the ones I use, but there are more. It would be really nice if the shopping search engines knew that I could get a certain kick back from the amount of sale, and they would display the price like "Seller price - $399, use FatCash for additional 4% ($12) off".

That would naturally involve some kind of cooperation with the cashback site, but that would definitely add some value for the consumer. I don't see any search engine implementing it soon (after all, it would be eBates and FatCash making money off this feature, not the engine), but if Google were to implement similar program, I would sign up for it.

I don't really see what the big deal is.

[suman28]

Google is the best of all these, and besides, most people don't really care for what search engine provides what. I would think they go to all these engines looking for the best prices and go the store to look at the actual product also. So, all this competition is pointless seeing that google will come out on top.

Re:I don't really see what the big deal is.

[Wun Hung Lo]

Not possible, mon frere. Microsoft is the clear leader in the search field (even though they haven't done it yet). To quote the head of MS's search project, "Google is a nice little search engine, but nothing compared to my vision." I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm quivering with anticipation. I know that you non-believers will say, "But Wun Hung Lo, how is it possible that I will do a search on MS's web site and not find my answer, but if I do the query on Google, I will find a hit on MS's website! Is it possible that Google has MS indexed better than MS themselves?" All I can say that it is an unexplainable anomaly and will be fixed with the next security patch. MS search rules!!

Re:I don't really see what the big deal is.

[GnuVince]

That's such an idiotic comment. You are then of the opinion that projects such as Linux, Mozilla, OpenOffice.Org, The GIMP, etc. are useless because Windows, Internet Explorer, MS Office and Photoshop are available and people don't really care for what software they use? You say that competition is useless: let's all stop using alternative operating systems and let's all use Windows, there's no point in fighting it, it will come out on top!

Wake up, competition in the search engine industry benifits the users, just like Linux made Microsoft work harder on Windows.

Re:I don't really see what the big deal is.

[crucini]

"Google is a nice little search engine, but nothing compared to my vision."

That's the eternal problem of comparing realities to visions. The realities always look pretty dull in comparison. No real government can measure up to the visions of Communism or Libertarianism.

Help Yahoo?

[vijayiyer]

I wonder if this will help Yahoo have a P/E ratio of better than their current 128. It seems like the tech bubble is back - Yahoo's stock price has more than doubled in the last year.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What of ODP/DMOZ/Google Directory?

[Anonymous Coward]

Froogle bumped Directory off the front page. This is a major blow to DMOZ, the second after Netscape more or less abandoned it.

Re:What of ODP/DMOZ/Google Directory?

[Lucius Septimius Sev]

DMOZ is still going to be popular however Google and soon Yahoo and maybe MSN pretty much made its teams of admins and mods seem less important. Most will still try to climb it but the system just lost its appeal. DMOZ is now just another good feature of the Google site not a unique project like it once was. I hope Google keeps it humming.

Re:What of ODP/DMOZ/Google Directory?

[Mynister]

DMOZ is still king, but is it getting too big for its britches?

A friend tried to become an editor but with little or no response to his applications. I know he would like to help out but they do not seem to be interested in any help or saying why this person is not good enough to help out.

The same goes for site listing. They are slow to react if they do at all.

Is this the common experience or is my friend just hopeless? I sort of would like to tell him that the slashdot community has deemed him hopeless. :)

Pray for Mojo

Re:What of ODP/DMOZ/Google Directory?

[yppiz]

Permit me a constructive mini-rant here - please read it before moderating it as -5 troll.

ODP/DMoz is dead.

I don't mean that it's a bad idea, I mean that while I found ODP/DMoz to be very, very useful four years ago, I no longer search it for starting points. The links in ODP are stale and rarely of better quality than what I get back from Google.

And now to my rant.

For several years, I've volunteered to participate as a DMoz/ODP editor. I enjoy helping out and volunteering, and I submitted applications in which I had very, very strong domain knowledge (collaborative filtering was one).

I went through a fair amount of work filling out the application form for ODP/DMoz editor status, for a subject that had no editor, and what happened? They rejected me without comment.

Here I am, a domain expert on collaborative filtering, not just with academic credentials, but with two deployed and fairly heavily used systems, and they dropped my application without comment. (And at the time, I had no commercial relationship with either filter, so I doubt it was because of perceived bias).

Same thing happened when I applied to be an editor of another unrelated category.

These were both categories that did not yet have editors, and here I was, a pretty qualified applicant, and getting rejected without comment.

So I gave up. I just didn't get it, and left with the perception that DMoz/ODP was some collection of people who all knew each other, rather than an open volunteer effort. I don't know that this is true, but it's why I didn't vclunteer any more.

Is ODP/DMoz dead? I don't know, but as a user, I find Google better, and as someone who volunteers for community projects (Wikipedia admin, journal reviewer, scientific conference organizer), I think ODP/DMoz seems broken from the community side as well.

Here are my suggestions: ODP should open up the editorial application process. None of this secret anonymous stuff. Further, they should actively seek qualified volunteers. Finally, they should automate as much as possible to increase coverage and accuracy. DMoz is still a great idea, and I believe it can again become the directory of useful knowledge - the place I would turn to when a straight search fails.

--Pat

Re:What of ODP/DMOZ/Google Directory?

[Lucius Septimius Sev]

It depends on what areas of the Directory you want to be part of. In the porn ( or other popular sections ) most of the MODs know each other and have been part of the project from the start and only let those in who will help them rank their own pages. This was a problem a year or so ago. I have no idea if they cleaned these people out but it was talked about on quite a few fourms.

Re:What of ODP/DMOZ/Google Directory?

[KjetilK]

You're not alone in seeing dmoz falling apart. I joined dmoz just as it was renamed from gnuhoo to newhoo (you know what-hoo didn't like either), and so I was in there really early.

What happened with dmoz is that it attracted a lot of spammers, and since once people were approved as editors, they could cause a lot of damage, they started to screen new signups, and rejected something like 95% of applicants.

You weren't the only one to experience rejection in spite of good credentials. At the time, dmoz had the potential to attract many good scholars, since many good scholars were actually involved in making directories of web resources. But it most of them, and you can't tell a good scholar to try and sign up twice, or start playing in the shallow waters. He's not interested in that.

OTOH, Some people got additional privileges, but the problem was that many of those had no clue at all. For example, I was really pissed when I experienced one meta-editor overruling editorial decisions I made in category, and it was extremely clear that the meta-editor had no clue whatsoever what s/he was doing in there. After a flamefest in the foras, I quit editing that category, and it remains in a sorry state.

Another problem was that many had the goal of growing beyond Yahoo at all costs...

Eventually, I quit editing alltogether. It is several years going by now.

I think your perception about a small club is wrong, however, because it was not my perception from the inside. It was a lot of controversy around these issues, and many suggested that the policy of rejecting 95% and having possibly good people play in shallow waters was a bad idea. The problem with the spammers is something one would have to deal with differently.

All in all, I think it boils down to giving individuals too much power: Instead of letting one editor have power to post (and meta-editors clean up if it was wrong), one could have a voting system. By letting meta-editors have absolute power over topical editors, it certainly corrupted meta-editors too, same problem, same solution.

I think the downfall of dmoz is due to the very same mechanisms that cause anybody that gets too much power to become corrupt. Power corrupts, and every social system has to deal with it.

Re:What of ODP/DMOZ/Google Directory?

[yppiz]

I was persistent - I applied two or three times over as many years. I think the rejection would have been less annoying had it been accompanied by a "rejected by so-and-so for the following reason" with at least some chance of dialog.

Instead, rejection was denial without any appeal. As you pointed out, this is a good way to turn off potential volunteers.

Building a successful community is a surprisingly tough balance of rules and social structures. It's something that communities almost never get right in the first few iterations. I hope ODP/DMoz continues to work on this.

--Pat

The question is...

[FortKnox]

The question is what comparison shopping search did yahoo use to buy Kelkoo??

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone got a Venn diagram of this?

resellerratings.com

[enrico_suave]

Ressellerratings.com has some neat comparison shopping functionality. along with the the vendor rating info, it allows you to figure out what would be cheapest when buying several items including shipping.

Sometimes buying the cheapest items (e.g. from a pricewatch search) spread across different stores costs more when you are done than if you were to take a different approach and lump some of the purchases together.

another neat tool for amazon only is pricenoia some products might be cheaper overseas even after shipping/exchange rate.

*shrug* YMMV,

e.

Re:resellerratings.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Make it easy and just watch places like Devsdeals.com for the best prices on stuff.

No, the next battleground is Site Match

[Everyman]

The next battleground is not comparison shopping. Much more important is the coming battle over Yahoo's Site Match program. Site Match plans to insert paid listings into the main algorithmic index without labeling these links. The FTC frowns on this, unless Yahoo can show that these links are ranked the same as unpaid links. A new site called Yahoo Watch is already tabulating the ranking differential between paid and unpaid links. Google doesn't mess with the unpaid listings, Ask Jeeves doesn't, and Microsoft, according to some comments that were made last week, is taking a hard look at this issue for their upcoming search engine that will be launched in about a year.

Re:The future of search.

[scum-e-bag]

All of this could be avoided if I had a user side application that indexed my browser cache. A local database of indexed webpages that I have already seen would heed the best results under the previous scenario. Such a scenario is not uncommon.

The google toolbar already incorporates part of this functionality by use of the drop down search.

add to the mix: shopping.com just filed for an IPO

[websensei]

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, Shopping.com is the No. 2 most-visited comparison-shopping site. estimating a $75 million take from the IPO.

dmnews.com article, 3/26/2004

Yahoo

[Ender Ryan]

Does anyone else find it funny that Yahoo is so cluttered and confusing (well, IMHO anyway) that it should really have a search engine just for itself?

Heh, nothing worse than trying to get stuff done and having to use a site that's just got too damn much on it.

Re:Yahoo

[Anonymous Coward]

http://search.yahoo.com

"site:yahoo.com [what-you-want-searched-here]"

But I agree, it is too cluttered.

Re:Yahoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo news section alone make it a million times better then google. news.google sucks, why can't I comment on stories like on yahoo?

plus google is so far behind in its features such as finance that it is pathetic. people that complain about yahoo be "cluttered and confusing" lack the ability to organize thier thoughts. google is for lazy people.

I hope this works better than PriceWatch

[FunkSoulBrother]

I have a bad feeling Froogle is going to get taken by the same people who list things for a dollar on Pricewatch and then you can't find anything near that price when you click the link.

Re:I hope this works better than PriceWatch

[Petronius]

or a flurry of pr0n popups open... it's going to be tough indeed.

someone needs to cash in...

[abscondment]

by providing a service to compare all of the comparison services.

Re:What I'd like to see in a shopping search engin

[Otter]

Froogle, however, is purely search engine. Just like the Google Web search, you'll be in their database if you happen to sell something, your site has a dollar tag on it next to the product, and you're not hiding your products behind some obscure interface that search engine has no access to.

Maybe I just have peculiar tastes, but -- Froogle almost never comes close to giving me a true lowest price. I'm not a hard-core online bargain hunter but instead frequently check Froogle and then go over to Amazon or something equally high-profile and find the same thing for 20% less.

YMMV, obviously...

Google makes a move, many moves

[markkellman]

The upgrading of Froogle is only part of a much larger Google overhaul today. Other new features include a personalized search, and an email web alerts service. The latter seems to be a scaled-down copy of the well known Google Alert service. Can anyone find an overarching pattern to all these moves?

Re:Google makes a move, many moves

[WallaceSz]

Good question! they may be trying to stake a claim in all the major serach-infrastructure related services, including shopping, email, etc.

Re:Google makes a move, many moves

[manmanic]

Google do seem to be covering all their bases. Their release of the Web Alerts doesn't seem to stop them supporting the efforts of Google Alert (which uses Google's Web APIs). On Google Alert's FAQs it says "Google has encouraged us to develop, and agreed to let us charge for, a premium Google Alert service that will be released shortly."

Re:Google makes a move, many moves

[suziewilkes]

I think Google, MSN, and Yahoo are positioning themselves to be "all things to all people".

MSN hinted today that it will be offering an online music service as well. I wonder if Google or Yahoo will follow suit...

Re:Google makes a move, many moves

[Anonymous Coward]

They also have a calculator. Don't know how long that's been there for though. Quite handy nonetheless.

Re:What I'd like to see in a shopping search engin

[ZachReligious]

Froogle, however, is purely search engine. Just like the Google Web search, you'll be in their database if you happen to sell something, your site has a dollar tag on it next to the product, and you're not hiding your products behind some obscure interface that search engine has no access to.

Not Exactly True... I have done a couple of websites that use comparison engines, and they both use a feed to submit the product listings to froogle.

I think it's a good thing. It allows the stores to keep their listings up to date as far as pricing and such goes. (and probably more accurate than a spider can generate)

Re:The future of search.

[Anonymous Coward]

Competing against Google seems futile at this point in my life

Can you say "pedantic"?

. If you feel these ideas are worth while, feedback is appreciated.

Don't hold your breath...

Re:The future of search.

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Competing against Google seems futile at this point in my life.

I bet all Google employees are letting out a sigh of relief at this very moment...

Re:The future of search.

[Psychic Burrito]

The "search through the webpages you've seen in the past 3 years" feature is a killer. I'm really looking forward using it.
To be useful, for me it had to be:
- Extremely low on the cpu
- keep the database small (10'000 webpages in 50MB or less)
- fast. Let me search in 2seconds tops.

Anyobdy already working on this?

Re:What I'd like to see in a shopping search engin

[amigoro]

Froogle, however, is purely search engine. Just like the Google Web search, you'll be in their database if you happen to sell something, your site has a dollar tag on it next to the product, and you're not hiding your products behind some obscure interface that search engine has no access to.

You have made a very valid point. On other sites are, for all intents adn purposes, surchable advertisement database, where as froogle is truly a price seeking search engine.

Any price searching system, where the seller has to pay to get in, is not a fair one for the consumer. It is often the case that the difference in price, and actual worth, of a product is more advertising than profit. And if vendors have to pay more to get their products advertised on price comparisions search enginers, then, that cost is passed on to the consumer. And some sellers might not just want to, or might not have the budget to pay for such services. In those circumstances, the consumer loses out by not being shown the cheapest seller on the market.

From strictly "consumer is the king" standpoint, Froogle is the only true price comparison search engine of the ones you mentioned. But as a business model, froogle might not be the most successful. Time will only tell.

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Can't sort on PriceGrabber?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why wouldn't PriceGrabber allow to sort results by price? Wierd ...

Watch out MSN and Yahoo!

[peterdaly]

The search engines of MSN and Yahoo! are nothing more than engines that search throught paid listings (ads) with enough "backfill" included to try and hide the fact.

Neither one understands who their primary customer is. Hint: it is not the advertiser.

Talk is cheap. Neither Yahoo! or MSN have yet shown any evidence of having anything even close to competing with Google for the informeed searcher (notice [MSN, are you listening?] I didn't call the searcher the "consumer".)

-Pete

Re:Watch out MSN and Yahoo!

[RAMMS EIN]

``Neither Yahoo! or MSN have yet shown any evidence of having anything even close to competing with Google for the informeed searcher''

However, MSN has a powerful ally: MicroSoft Internet Explorer. I don't remember the details (it's been a long time since I last had to use MSIE), but it will send you to MSN search sometimes. MicroSoft could easily (and I think they will) add a search field like Mozilla and Opera have, and have it use MSN Search. That would significantly tilt the playing field in MSN's favor.

Pricewatch is rotting like the rest of OSDN

[SuperBanana]

Pricewatch used to be cool and useful. Now, all the vendors are using tricks in their ads. For example, search for a popular wireless router, and easily the entire first page is for some crappy no-name router with the text "JUST LIKE (insert model number of the popular router)". Do they get de-listed for doing it? Of course not, because nobody's policing it anymore.

Many vendors I used to use and like have stopped listing with pricewatch for just such reasons. Like the rest of OSDN, there's no active work; they swallowed a bunch of popular resources, and then it's just "let's go on cruise control, and sell as many ads as we can". Notice how on a regular basis we get 500 errors when trying to post? In fact, I'd be willing to bet the only development done on slashdot in the least 2 years has been a)adding subscriptions and b)adding more advertisements.

Re:Pricewatch is rotting like the rest of OSDN

[Troed]

Notice how on a regular basis we get 500 errors when trying to post?

Umm no, can't say it has ever happened actually.

Really.

Re:Pricewatch is rotting like the rest of OSDN

[TwinkieStix]

Have you been looking at the "recent comments" section? That's changed 2 times in the last three weeks. What about the changes to moderation over the last year or so? Google has been doing a relatively good job of filtering out as much search spam as they can (remember the fiasco in January?) on the search engine side, so it stands to reason that they'd do the same for froogle.

Re:Pricewatch is rotting like the rest of OSDN

[simoniker]

I'm not intimately involved with that part of the site, but OSDN uses Pricegrabber, not Pricewatch.

Searching for Linksys on Pricegrabber just gave me, well, a bunch of Linksys products. I do agree that searching for Linksys on Pricewatch gives you a bunch of clone products, though. Damn you and your trickery, Pricewatch!

What is the point?

[bwindle2]

I don't really understand these sites... Doing a search for a common product (such as a 2.8C Intel P4 Retail) shows you can get it about $5 cheaper than from, say, NewEgg.com. Now, NewEgg also gives you free 2nd-day shipping, and you are dealing with a company that you *know* and trust (if not, just check them out at ResellerRatings, they rock). Is the risk worth $5? I say no. I buy all my stuff from NewEgg, and have never looked back.

Re:What is the point?

[stratjakt]

People buy things other than computer components online.

Newegg or googlegear are fine for electronics, I use them too and dont bother with pricewatch searches anymore..

But what if you want a baby crib, a waffle iron, a pair of boot cut jeans and alligator boots to go with them, a unicicle, or a chia pet?

Right now I know many regular folks who buy online through Amazon, you can find practically anything. You're really buying from partners (Toys R Us, Office Depot, Etc), but Amazon makes a convenient portal to do so.

That's what these folks all want. For people like my mother to just instinctively go to "msn.com", like she does Amazon now, when she's christmas shopping for the grandkids.

Marketers Out of Control!?!?

[Azghoul]

What the hell, exactly, is a Kelkoo?

"Pricegrabber", at least I can see where they got that name...

Re:Marketers Out of Control!?!?

[glMatrixMode]

The name Kelkoo has probably been chosen by french-speaking people, because it is pronounced exactly like the french sentence "Quel cout ?" (sorry, slashdot doesn't seem to accept the circumflex accents, even when typed in HTML...) which means "What cost ?".

Besides I remember there has been a lot of advertising for Kelkoo in France a few years ago.

Re:Marketers Out of Control!?!?

[anonicon]

Kelkoo is the Latin word for a species that's notable for being too fat, too lazy and too stupid to work at finding a decent domain name after discovering that Europrice.com was already registered.

You can see a Kelkoo here. :-)

Engine different how?

[peterdaly]

Aren't MSN and Yahoo just product search engines as it is with enough backfill included to try and hide the fact?

-Pete

Re:Engine different how?

[Anonymous Coward]

Watch out MSN and Yahoo! (Score:3, Insightful) by peterdaly (123554) on Monday March 29, @12:06PM

The search engines of MSN and Yahoo! are nothing more than engines that search throught paid listings (ads) with enough "backfill" included to try and hide the fact.

This needed to be said twice?

Re:The future of search.

[Iscariot_]

All of this could be avoided if I had a user side application that indexed my browser cache. A local database of indexed webpages that I have already seen would heed the best results under the previous scenario. Such a scenario is not uncommon.

Good idea, however it might be cooler if users were able to personalize google with their own name/pass and then it remembers where you've been on their end. (Maybe up to n-sites, n being greater than 5,000.) The more client-side data I have to tote around the more pain in the ass it becomes. I'd rather be able to get such features anywhere.

The web needs to incorporate a Nielsen Ratings system.

This idea I like also, but there's a big flaw in your solution. It is a little too slashdot-like. Not to say that slashdot doesn't have an excellent moderation scheme, but do I really want to rely on such a thing for data searching? Probably not. All too often comments get modded to 5 even though they are filled with erronious facts or lies. I'd prefer my searches to be as objective as possible.

Search Fears

[The-Dalai-LLama]

Now that search has been monetized, the next battleground for big money is in comparison shopping

I may be a little too cynical, but I use Google about a googillion times a day, and the more references I see about the search engines becoming the next playing field for big-money, the more afraid I become. A handful of paid advertisements on the right side of the screen are fine, but with the evil empire stating that they don't want me to be able to even get on the net without seeing a Microsoft ad and all the big money playaz making major announcements about their intent to dominate the search engine field, all I see are bad things headed our way.

A lot of people are spending a lot of money to break in, and there wouldn't be this much interest without some really good plans for making us pay for all of it.

The Dalai Llama
remember when MTV used to play music videos?

Re:Search Fears

[qualico]

I agree.

There will be ad saturation on a bigger scale.

Similar to the domain name infection, now our search engines are going to be lost in a monopoly of business posteruring.

Its all about control in the end.

Re:What I'd like to see in a shopping search engin

[romcabrera]

You are forgetting the added value of engines like PriceWatch, shopping.com, etc.: Knowing how good/bad are the stores you find out being with the lowest price. Google only let you find out about the stores and prices, but you have no means to know (besides doing other searches) if that specific store is a safe place to buy, or if it just another shop with terrible service, delivery, etc.

Re:What I'd like to see in a shopping search engin

[DrSkwid]

http://froogle.google.com/froogle/merchants.html

Google crawls billions of webpages every month, so you'll likely be included automatically in Froogle's index of sites. If for some reason your store is not showing up and you would like it to be included in Froogle, please submit a data feed. Doing so will ensure that your entire product catalog is included in Froogle, and it will also allow you to control the freshness and accuracy of your product information. Feeds can be updated as you add new products, change prices, offer special promotions, or discontinue products.

Re:The future of search.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to say that slashdot doesn't have an excellent moderation scheme

I can't decide if you're being sarcastic, or if you genuinely fail to realize the Slashdot moderation system consists of mostly clueless people giving grades to other clueless people's posts, then more clueless people giving grades to the grades given by the first set of clueless people...

And another interesting question is...

[fiannaFailMan]

..why is there something very familiar about this:

Now that search has been monetized, the next battleground for big money is in comparison shopping, beyond MySimon and other smaller ones.

Is it just me or is there another bubble building up here?

But what's so bad about that?

[Hell O'World]

How'd you like it if you owned Kleenex and then heard everyone call every tissue Kleenex?

I think it would be great! How does it hurt Kleenex? So people go to the store with Kleenex on their list, they are MORE likely to buy the Kleenex brand, not less. How do the other brands benefit? They can't say Joe's Kleenex on the box.

I'm going to Google that... now what was that URL? Hmmm... yahoo.com, right?

Re:But what's so bad about that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Companies can't use the word kleenex on their competing brand, so it is not truely generic. But your company name can become legally generic if you don't protect it. What about the Yellow Pages? The phone company let that fall into generic use, and now anybody can have their own yellow pages.
I Googled (damn, can't seem to stop) for this and found this list of former name brands:
escalator, trampoline, raisin
bran, lanolin, cube steak, high octane, nylon, mimeograph, kerosene, and
cornflakes.

Re:But what's so bad about that?

[J. T. MacLeod]

It might be great, until you lose any brand recognition at all, and then find that you can't defend your trademark because it's become a generic name.

Re:But what's so bad about that?

[egomaniac]

They can't say Joe's Kleenex on the box.

Sure they can, if the word "Kleenex" becomes so widespread that it is no longer a defensible trademark.

Don't believe me? Then you probably didn't know that "aspirin" and "cellophane", for example, were originally trademarks, not generic words. They were lost to common usage. It does happen, and companies will spend a fortune to try to stop it.

Re:But what's so bad about that?

[scrytch]

Don't believe me? Then you probably didn't know that "aspirin" and "cellophane", for example, were originally trademarks, not generic words. They were lost to common usage.

Actually you'll still see a Registered Trademark Symbol after Aspirin if you buy Bayer brand, but it's not actually meaningful now. Bayer AG had to give up their trademark to Aspirin as a term of the Treaty of Versailles after WWI.

Factoid for ya, another trademark Bayer lost that way: Heroin.

Re:But what's so bad about that?

[The-Dalai-LLama]

The free advertising is great, the problem comes when your quality name becomes widely associated with shoddy products.

Example (completely fictitious and anecdotal): You spend a lot of time and resources to ensure that your Trampoline(tm) brand exercise products are fun and safe, but you don't pay enough attention to keep your trademarked name secure. The Profit-From-Kidz corporation releases a line of shoddy trampolines responsible for the deaths of 35 tots (really cute, photogenic tots). Global headlines trumpet the dangers of "trampolines", the market collapses, your company folds. If your trademarked name had been protected, headlines about the dangers of the Profit-From-Kidz Suspended Exercise Spring Mat would have had much less impact on your business.

Why do you think the makers of a certain type of interlocking construction toy are so rabid about protecting their trademarks? The PR difference between a headline about a child choking on a "construction brick" and a child choking on a Lego(tm - please don't sue me) is huge.

The Dalai Llama
when my cult goes international, I'll want 25 cents everytime somebody says llama...

Re:But what's so bad about that?

[nolife]

They were lost to common usage.

They are normally lost because the companies own success or use general use (or unintended use like a verb) of the trademarked and or patented product name and also a lack of action to prevent misuse of the word. A good description of the concept is here . Aspirin had more factors then just a generic name and was lost quickly. Interestingly, I remember Yahoo having commerical asking, "Do you Yahoo?".

Re:But what's so bad about that?

[Vargasan]

I do believe LEGO are much more semantic than that. LEGO is all captials. You'll notice that they always have the trademark in capitals.

Examples from the webpage you linked:
"We do not like all the pirate copies of LEGO(R) elements which we have seen, especially during the past 25 years."
"The LEGO Group..."
"How LEGO(R) Enthusiasts May Refer to LEGO Products on the Internet"

Re:But what's so bad about that?

[Shakrai]

I'd never heard this before so I researched it briefly (Google is still the king) to see what the scoop was. This is an interesting website with the backstory on this little known factoid of history.

Learn something new every day. Welcome to my friends list :)

Re:The future of search.

[fgc]

I was looking for something similar and in the end I came up with the idea of using LaunchBar at home and AppRocket at work.

It's not ideal, but it does mean that I can just shove everything remotely useful in as a bookmark and use them to search my bookmarks (and remember the search terms I use).

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the most irrelavant piece of news i've seen in slashdot for a long time, I mean shopping, so what.

Translation: I don't care about it, therefore it is irrelevant to the universe at large.

Courtesy of the new AltaVista "Dumbass to English" translator.

Re:The future of search.

[eyeye]

No you misunderstand what he means, he means track and remember - not him having to remember what site to search in.

Re:The future of search.

[strictnein]

To be useful, for me it had to be:
- Extremely low on the cpu
- keep the database small (10'000 webpages in 50MB or less)
- fast. Let me search in 2seconds tops.

Anyobdy already working on this?

I am, but mine has the following specs:
- Extremely cpu intensive
- huge 5 GB Database per year archived
- extremely slow with frequent system crashes, at least 50 minutes per search and the search program gets set to the highest priority so nothing else can function

Not interesting

[tkrotchko]

I find it very interesting that a dot-com is selling for over half a billion dollars years after the dot-com bust.

The must have a helluva cash flow to justify that kind of pricetag.

Re:The future of search.

[stevey]

Me!

Well kinda.

I have had the difficulty you mention several times in the past, and vowed to do soemthing about it.

What I did was write a simple perl proxy server that sits between my browser and the internet.

Every page that you view is passed through the proxy and it records some details, right now it just records "date + time", "URL", and "page title".

These are stored in a simple CSV format which can be searched with grep.

I had planned on writing a little HTTP server to go along with the proxy so I could sidebar it, and allow online searching - however I didn't get round to it.

If there's any interest I could post the code, but to be honest it's sufficiently trivial that it wouldn't take a Perl coder more than an hour to duplicate.

Then don't use the Internet!

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'd prefer my searches to be as objective as possible."

Not if you're using the internet. Use Expedia or Brittanica for that.

Its like asking CBS or NBC to provide a completely objective reporting (I'm sure CBS will be glad to tell you why Viacom should be able to suck up every single TV and Radio station on the planet...)

Re:The future of search.

[Xzzy]

> there is this web page i've seen briefly in the
> past at one time or another. Today, I need to find
> that web page.

Mozilla's history browser is quite good at this. Granted it only shines on sites you visited 6 days or less ago (everything else gets lumped into one group), but all it takes is a quick scan of the domain names and you can generally pick out what you need.

I suppose it could be cool to have mozilla record the referrer for every domain, and if it came from a search engine it stores the query you sent. This would later enable you to find that site by keyword in the history.

But then I guess you gotta wait for some programmer with an itch to implement it. ;)

Re:What I'd like to see in a shopping search engin

[stinkyfingers]

Froogle is nice in that it's just looking for the price, but don't those other sites offer something in the way of vendor ratings. A lot of times, you can find a seller that you've become comfortable with or has good word-of-mouth. For example, I buy all my computer gear at newegg.com.

But when I needed some Moen faucets to finish off a bathroom remodel, I looked to the Net rather than special order them from Home Depot. Having found some vendor ratings for those site proved helpful.

Local Search

[wombatmobile]

They're also competing for local search.

Try Google lab's for pizza in your (American) city or zipcode.

Re:The future of search.

[monstroyer]

Have you seen Butler (aka Another Launcher). It's free.

Re:The future of search.

[Anonymous Coward]

After browsing for pr0n I like to clear my browser's history and cache so that the girlfriend doesn't stumble upon something. This idea bascially let's anyone search for what pr0n websites my "cat" has been looking at over the last year.

Re:The future of search.

[costas]

Well, my newsbot does this already for news articles you've read through it: you can search everything, you can search articles you've read, or articles you've read *and* rated highly. You can also set up "search alerts" that search any new articles and then stick them to your front page (or your personalized RSS feed, or your personalized PDA-optimized page). Check it out.

This is going to suck

[pair-a-noyd]

Now we'll never be able to run a search for anything with out all the commercial sites showing up in the first 4000-5000 hits.

Froogle?

[digidave]

Froogle hasn't been put on the front page for google.ca and .com forwards me to .ca. What I wonder is why Froogle is limited to the US site. The Internet is worldwide and I've ordered from US online merchants before. What's stopping them from including Froogle on all their localized home pages and simply adding a note saying it only searches US merchants?

I guess they don't believe in the global Internet economy.

Re:Froogle?

[Doctor Crumb]

It doesn't just search US merchants; I found one of my own non-US sites listed in froogle. True, it's a .com, but that's no indication of location these days.

Re:The future of search.

[Anonymous Coward]

> The web needs to incorporate a Nielsen Ratings system

Absolutely nothing stops you from doing this right now. Finding people who would actually find value in it is another thing entirely.

Re:The future of search.

[scrytch]

> The web needs to incorporate a Nielsen Ratings system.

You mean like the one Nielsen already has?

Re:The future of search.

[ckuijjer]

You could try the OmniWeb Beta, it indexes the sites you have in your history (btw. there is a search framework in Panther that you could use to build something like this yourself)

Re:The future of search.

[monstroyer]

" After browsing for pr0n I like to clear my browser's history and cache so that the girlfriend doesn't stumble upon something. This idea bascially let's anyone search for what pr0n websites my "cat" has been looking at over the last year."

Ideally, you'd be able to turn the indexing off and on at will. When you are about to cheat on your girlfriend with "Palmela", click on the "If the trailor is a rocking" button to turn off indexing. Turn it on when your 15 minutes is up.

You and your cat must be having some good times.

Froogle Spamming?

[ripperbenz]

Before the interception of Froogle, a friend of mine had this idea of a crawler that crawls the Web to find the best price for a desired product. One of the reasons I told him his idea might fail was that the spider cannot confirm that a product will actually be sold for the advertised price. Malicious sellers would then advertise products at ridiculous prices, just to top the list of results.

Maybe that's why Froogle lists results by some secret "Best match" algorithm, but I suspect it would pretty quickly become the next target of rogue merchants, especially because Froogle has a consuming-oriented audience. We'll can only wait and see how Google's smarties fight back; maybe they'll created a database of trusted merchants, the way Google News works.

price grabbers DOS web sites

[mabu]

A few years ago, I discovered one of my servers slowed to a crawl. Upon further inspection it was one of (the more prominent) price-grabber systems hammering various client sites collecting prices. Many of them seem to open tons of simultaneous connections and effectively DOS'd the server. We had to complain for two days to get them to back off. I'm not a big fan of these sites, and most of the time the shipping/availability as indicated isn't accurate.

Re:price grabbers DOS web sites

[Anonymous Coward]

well... that's what rate limiting and qos is good at. there's no reason your servers need to reply to their robots using all your bandwidth until they stop.

just sounds like bad ops on your end... what if some other site did a crawl?

Wikipedia and Yahoo

[teslatug]

Some of you may be interested to know that Yahoo has announced that Wikipedia will be among its CAP partners.

Re:The future of search.

[brucmack]

The interesting optimization here isn't so much space used but how the results are actually displayed. Data stored client-side is supposed to influence the search results, so one of two things has to happen:

1) Some data needs to be sent from the client to the server on every search.
2) The client has to receive the raw search data and then do the ordering.

I can see problems with both of these. In situation 1, either all the websites viewed needs to be sent (causing a bandwidth bottleneck), or there needs to be some local filtering to pick out the relevant websites based on the search (requires more data be stored about each site, and a client-side search engine).

In situation 2, there is potentially a lot of data to be sorted out. The only real practical way to do it I guess would be to have Google order it normally, but send some listing of all the URLs in the results, and the client app would float those up to the top. Depending on implementation this could work ok I guess, but slow things down considerably perhaps?

Well, there is also a third option, which avoids the client altogether: Google could track one's searches and keep track of which links were clicked. Of course, this would never happen just for that benefit.

Re:The future of search.

[Duhavid]

Well, that is not *quite* my experience..

Some pages I visit are good. Most ( as the law states ) are crap. I dont want to keep the crap, just the good.

On popularity, it varies by subgroup and intent. What I think as a programmer trying to find technical information ought to be a popular page will not apply to someone out of the group.

Re:What I'd like to see in a shopping search engin

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of the price comparison engines also visit the merchants' webpages, so you're wrong there.

BTW: Google "recommnds" that merchants also give a "data feed" to them. Otherwise they get little control over how their products get collected.

http://froogle.google.com/froogle/merchants.html

Re:What I'd like to see in a shopping search engin

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you realize the amount of work required to keep a database of products accurate. It's NOT like traditional search engines.

If you take a GeForce graphics card as an example, shops might call it "GeForceFX5200", "GF-5200FX", "Gef.FX-5200" etc. When you combine this with millions of different products, you get a lot of combinations. This index needs to be taken care of, and that costs more money than pure advertising can pay for.

As an example I tried these searches on Froogle

"GeforceFX" - "139 confirmed...did you mean geforcemx?"

"Geforce FX" - "281 confirmed"

Google don't have a real product catalog like other pure shopping comparison engines, so they can't give as accurate results.

moderation

[Zirtix]

+1, Insightful!

Voodoo Hoodoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Kelkoo Yahoo Google Froogle. Man, you're not cOOl unless you've got the oo's.

Re:The future of search.

[Octagon Most]

- Extremely cpu intensive
- huge 5 GB Database per year archived
- extremely slow with frequent system crashes, at least 50 minutes per search and the search program gets set to the highest priority so nothing else can function

Wow, I developed something very similar for email. It's called Outlook and I am hoping it catches on and becomes really popular. Check it out and let all of your friends know about it.

-bill

Quality of engines

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is the quality not improving. I ran across a nice interative French site, http://lrflash.voila.com/, but there is no equivalent in English. What's become of the technological advantage we are supposed to have? these buyouts and aggressive positioning in the markets aren't bringing us the quality products.

Re:The future of search.

[MindStalker]

couldn't you just search google then cross reference its results with the ones in your database?

Froogle.

[ajutla]

I've played around with Froogle a little; it seems prety accurate. It used to give you bogus prices when you'd search for a given item, though; lately it's gotten better.

yahoo wins!

[theendlessnow]

I can't even create one good spam mail address from google. It's like they're not even setup to support the spammer. Lame google.

wow - i had no idea

[nFriedly]

OSDN is good stuff! PriceGrabbar is my favorite shopping site (with froogle close behind in second place), and i had no idea that it was an affiliate of OSDN! Maby I'll just go shop there right now...

Re:The future of search.

[scrm]

All of this could be avoided if I had a user side application that indexed my browser cache. A local database of indexed webpages that I have already seen would heed the best results under the previous scenario.

How were you thinking the implementation would look? Like an option 'search sites I've already visited' next to 'search'? Or some other way?

It's quite a neat idea actually.

RTF other engines

[PHPgawd]

Has anybody here EVEN SEEN other sites like Yahoo Search (search.yahoo.com), or are we just supposed to assume, on faith, that Google will be the best no matter what, no matter what anybody else comes up with, etc. etc.

For my own part, I like Yahoo Search because it has the Yellow Pages and Maps functions built in (which I use all of the time). As for web search results, they all suck these days anyhow since all of the spammers have figured out how the engine algorithms work..

Actually...

[evil_one666]

Kelkoo is a phonetic representation of "quel cout" which translates to "how much", or "what price" in english.

For the French speaking part of europe at least, Kelkoo is the best branded website of all.

Re:The future of search.

[babbage]

The catch is that some pages are transient (generated pages, news articles, etc), so the data you're grabbing isn't necessarily enough to get back to that page in the future. It would probably be better to also record the client's GET or POST request, along with the post data, if any, as well as things like username/password [security issue, but maybe useful enough to warrant it]). Additionaly, it's probably worth setting aside space to cache the retrieved document as well, at least for text/* mime types, but maybe graphics & other media as well.

A proxy does sound like the right way to do this though, if only because a proxy neatly solves the problem of allowing people to switch between different computers (home, work, laptop) and still have access to a central traffic database.

I've worked with a Zope debugger that did basically this kind of thing: it acted as a proxy server, so you point your web browser at it, and it records timestamped .in and .out files for every request your web client makes, capturing all the data being sent both out to the remote web server and back in to your client browser. If you wanted to replay something, there were tools to fire off the .out files & parse the results that came back to make sure that the .in responses matched what you expected.

This kind of web proxy framework is very slick for web site debugging, but it could also be a suitable mechanism for the kind of "where was I?" tool that is being asked for. You could even do something silly like cache the .in and .out results in a big MySQL table with full text indexing on the payload field, so you could search it reasonably quickly.

A very clever system built over this would manage data aset growth by having a way to replace duplicated documents (images, text, etc) with something like symlinks to each other, so that you don't end up grabbing, say, hundreds of copies of the Slashdot logo. Better still, the software could detect page furniture (logos, icons, structural graphics, ads, etc) and throw that out while keeping the good stuff (news photos, etc). But that starts sounding like a deep AI problem, and is probably more trouble than it's worth. If you can just consolidate identical data, that's already a big win.

It would be interesting to see someone put these & related ideas together into something people could actually use. The closest things I know of -- and these are both worth reading about -- are Gordon Bell's MyLifeBits project at Microsoft Research, and Vannevar Bush's As We May Think essay for the July 1945 issue of Atlantic Monthly. Both of these concepts get into the same thing that we're talking about for the web here, but in a much broader way -- Bell wants to digitally record everything in his life, but we're only dealing with web activity.

Baby steps... :-)

Re:The future of search.

[stevey]

Yes I agree, it did cross my mind at one point that I could solve the problem if transience which you highlight by dumping the data into a database.

That would allow full text searching, meaning that even if you lost the original source you could still get the text of the pages you were looking for.

I think the reason I didn't get round to it was that I didn't have the space on the proxying machine - that's not a problem now.

Bill G was claiming that the bubble was back...

[blorg]

just this Friday:

"We are back in a mini-bubble era in terms of people expecting a lot of these valuations but I don't think we'll see the same amount of exits the way we did..."

- quote from this Silicon.com article. He was speaking at an MSN online advertising conference, so a lot on the future of ads; besides that he also seems to be very interested in wireless technology.

Re:The future of search.

[Idarubicin]

All too often comments get modded to 5 even though they are filled with erronious facts or lies.

I can hear it now--Janet Jackson testifies before the Senate Subcommittee on Obscenity in Football (not Pertaining to Salaries).

Senator: Originally, your story was that the flash...
Janet Jackson: Wardrobe malfunction, please.
Senator: Right. Wardrobe malfunction, was the result of an accident. Now, you say that that is not necessarily correct...?
JJ: Well, Senator, that depends on what your definition of is is.
Senator: So you're saying that you lied?
JJ: Not at all. Just that I presented some erroneous facts.
Senator: Erroneous facts. Ah, well...that's all right then. We use those to generate budgets, after all...

Erroneous fact.. noun. 1. Fiction created when a) you can't think of the real answer b) you don't expect anyone else to know. 2. Lie.

Now where is that Froogle API?

[JasonKey]

This is going to make a hell of a E-Commerce Aggregation Engine. Think of it this way, http://www.pricewatch.com is basically something similar, but with the power of Google, and this first step towards a standardized Merchant Data Feed with Google helping set that standard, things could get quite interesting. Are we going to see Blogger get into the scramble here? Are we soon to see RSS/Atom feeds for product types / lines?

I Agree 150%

[Psychic Burrito]

I completely agree. dmoz is dead. I myself was rejected about 5 times in the last 4 years. But the really important point is
- quality went down, way down
- the way dmoz works is against changing stuff quickly
- there is no peer review. Once you're an editor, you can pretty much do what you like. There is a master-subordinate system at work though so your category's parent's editor can control you, but this is wrong on so many levels:
a) those people are often lazy
b) those people can't look after everything
c) the system makes people eager to climb the ladder as fast as possible instead of working on things
d) leads to building of factions that work for each other.

In short, the basic rules of dmoz automatically lead to the mess we've got now.

But the biggest problem is: there is nothing better at hand, so Google and dozens of other website use its still the best thing around yet really bad.

I'd suggest to build something new along these lines:
- wiki-style editing to ensure fast updates
- slashdot-style modding to ensure good + fair quality
- meta-discussion forums to argue wheter any entry/mod/move/category-creation is correct with polls to decide otherwise
- Various anti-spammer/anti-troll methods, like relying on metamod-karma to ensure a safe and fair operation
- A final editorial team that gets out of the way in 99,99% of all cases, but tries hard to keep stop spammer from taking over the platform by constantly reworking the platform (like Slashdot, too).

Sounds interesting? Any work in this direction already on track? Somebody interested in starting it?

Froogle gets fooled that way already

[Aexia]

With sites that list multiple products on one page.

I've been searching for video cards on Froogle, to get an idea of price ranges. Several times Froogle has returned a top of the line video card for a couple hundred dollars less than everyone else.

But when I click on the page, it's really the same price. Froogle was just getting confused about another video card listed on the page. It just took the first price on the page, I think.

A lot of US merchants ship to Canada...

[blorg]

...which is seen as a special case. Far fewer ship futher afield (Europe for example). Next to none do this without exorbitant shipping fees, and then there are the taxes and duties that the customer will be assessed at the point of entry in their country. Frankly, it's not generally worth it for the consumer - even with the weak dollar, it worked out more or less the same price for me to get a Canon EOS 300D (Digital Rebel) from Germany, and without all the hassle of trying to deal with a US merchant (most of whom don't even reply to emails asking if they ship abroad).

Why Froogle is a Joke

[popo]

Poor Google.

They're smoking the crackpipe of their own search technology, and attempting to apply it to shopping.

In contrast to Froogle most other shopping agents (like MySimon, BizRate, Shopping.com, etc.) use a CPC (cost per click) model combined with a "bid" system which allows merchants to "bid up" their listings.

In other words if you're willing to pay a higher CPC (as big, well known brands typically are), you'll rank higher in the listings.

Froogle however, attempts to use its page ranking algorithms to determine *product* rank and positioning. The result is that users get a jumble of half-assed no-name generic products, garbage, and infrequently searched-for (albeit "well connected") results.

Try searching for "Sneakers" and you'll see the problem firsthand...

The problem is that Froogle attempts to undo the Darwinian laws of brand recognition in favor of its own laws of page-ranking. Newsflash: we consumers don't care. When we search for "Sneakers", we want Nike, Adidas, Puma and whatever else to come up first. Not some no-name $7 rubber soled shoe which happens to sell in 3119 discount stores all over the world.

Google should smell the coffee and adopt a bid system for Froogle. It would also help them generate some much needed pre-IPO revenue.

Overture sold to Yahoo! for $1.6 Billion. In my opinion Yahoo! got a good deal.

Why Froogle Sucks

[popo]

Poor Google.

They're smoking the crackpipe of their own search technology, and attempting to apply it to shopping.

As an online merchant I supply a data feed to *all* the shopping agents except Froogle. Why would I want to be buried 17 pages deep when I'm willing to spend $1 or more per click from a well-targeted user?

In contrast to Froogle most other shopping agents (like MySimon, BizRate, Shopping.com, etc.) use a CPC (cost per click) model combined with a "bid" system which allows merchants to "bid up" their listings.

In other words if you're willing to pay a higher CPC (as big, well known brands typically are), you'll rank higher in the listings.

Froogle however, attempts to use its page ranking algorithms to determine *product* rank and positioning. The result is that users get a jumble of half-assed no-name generic products, garbage, and infrequently searched-for (albeit "well connected") results.

Try searching for "Sneakers" and you'll see the problem firsthand...

Froogle attempts to undo the Darwinian laws of brand recognition in favor of its own laws of page-ranking. Newsflash: we consumers don't care. When we search for "Sneakers", we want results like Nike, Adidas, Puma and whatever else to come up first. Not some no-name $7 rubber soled shoe which happens to sell in 3119 discount stores all over the world.

Google should smell the coffee and adopt a bid system for Froogle. It would also help them generate some much needed pre-IPO revenue.

How about an Open Source / P2P Search Engine???

[pair-a-noyd]

Yeah, that's it, one based on OS, GPL and P2P princples and technology??

Instead of having all these commercialized search engines that churn up BULLSHIT with all the commercial sites turning up at the top and the USEFUL sites at the bottom of the heap.

Write it as an OS app and make it Peer to Peer based, better yet, work a little of the seti@home tech into it too.. Yeah, put all those idle computers to work as the worlds biggest NON COMMERCIAL search engine.

And under no circumstances allow commercial websites to take top of the heap as they do now, irregardless of the relevance of the search.

And include a search option you can tick on and off, "(x) exclude commercial and for profit sites"

I'm freaking sick of all these profiteers dictating how we use the Internet, this goes against the concept of an open society. They squash free speech in lieu of profit..

PARENT POST IS SPAM MOD IT DOWN

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent post is a spam he always has misleading links that leads to his web page. Mod this post down.

(Apologies for the repeat posting)

[popo]

/. kept returning a perl error so I didn't think the submit went through...

Doh!

Re:The future of search.

[UserGoogol]

Use Mozilla. Mozilla allows you to have multiple profiles, and by extension, multiple caches. You can simply start a seperate profile for your... less noble activities. (Or maybe start a new profile every time.)

Re:The future of search.

[frostman]

Quite interesting. I too have "wished I could" but never really thought twice about building such a thing.

Under Linux/BSD/etc it might be very easy to hack one together... you could just watch the cache (or the squid) and throw everything in a database.

Where I think it becomes more challenging is the small-disk-space requirement. If you have wide-ranging interests you're going to have a pretty huge database pretty quickly.

You might be able to get around that by strictly limiting what you keep - eg, metatags and obviously text content but not pictures or any HTML. Then maybe link into the Internet Archive to get the actual pages (since presumably a lot of them will have changed).

Now, what would be really cool is having all this integrated into the search tool on Firefox.

Imagine you could choose "History" as one of your search engines and it would search your history/cache (the size/lifespan/exclusions of which you have set) and for each result it would give you options to see your cache of the page, archive.org's history of the page, the page itself, Google's cache of the page, etc.

It might also be cool to have a little search appliance that you plug into your network and it does it all for you.

Food for thought anyway... If I wasn't so busy I'd try a squid/postgres version right now.

two words

[Anonymous Coward]

Pricewatch.com!

Re:fp

[1SmartOne]

dick

is comparison shop useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, I found a lots of sites with tons of products.. if sites on the net are trying to get specialised, why this 'portalisation' of comparison shops?
Would I buy from an unknown seller even if it's 1 buck cheaper? I doubt it.. I'll buy from a trusted site.. Take books, there are many bookstores but I trust Amazon, so what I can use at least is Pricenoia.com, a site that compares international Amazon sites to check if there's a better deal abroad (not easy nowadays). Maybe this international orientation is a new twist, or maybe they need to make real country specific comparison shops, but then they should be far better in most countries.
Anyway, yahoo is betting high on europe, while froggle is too USA-oriented.. Is froogle Intl on the works? I'm sure it is or they risk to lose a big slice of the cake. And for MS...who are they going to buy in order to enter the battle ASAP? Are they offering good comparison at the moment? I don't think so .. Pricegrabber, it's time for agressive PR! :)

Your sig

[crucini]

What if the creator is neither cruel nor kind, as we understand them, but has a mind as far beyond ours as ours is beyond the primitive guidance system of an amoeba? Aren't our notions of cruelty and kindness deeply rooted in our reality as transient, mortal animals? Put differently, we don't apply these ideas to bacteria because they exist on such a different plane of development.

Do you... Google?

[SphericalCrusher]

Yahoo is a verb also. ;)

I do believe that Google will continue to stay on top, even with the launch of their new interface (which is still simple). It just goes to show how simple things can help our lives.

Yahoo's purchase will not be in vain though. Maybe they won't rise to beat Google in the search engine wars, but after all... they are a lot more than just that. Yahoo is a lot of things; searching the internet through them is just a plus.