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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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. :-)

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.

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?

[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?

[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.

The question is...

[FortKnox]

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

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.

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: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!!

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.

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: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

[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: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.

[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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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

[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.

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: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: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...

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?

[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: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: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.

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: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.

[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.

Wikipedia and Yahoo

[teslatug]

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

moderation

[Zirtix]

+1, Insightful!

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...

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?