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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.
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.
Froogle bumped Directory off the front page. This is a major blow to DMOZ, the second after Netscape more or less abandoned it.
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.
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
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
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?
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)
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
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.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.
War doesn't prove who's right, just who's left.
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.
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.
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> The web needs to incorporate a Nielsen Ratings system.
You mean like the one Nielsen already has?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
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.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Some of you may be interested to know that Yahoo has announced that Wikipedia will be among its CAP partners.
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?".
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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.
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!
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.
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...
Nathan Friedly
And they also cut down on the features. With Deja(news) you could watch the threads that you had posted in.