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

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.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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?

[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 :)

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.

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: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: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: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."

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: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...

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?