October 29th, 2006
Froogle replacement discovered
Google announced in September they would have a new search tool to replace Froogle by the holiday shopping season. Unfortunately, searching for products on Google still shows results from Froogle, causing Ina Steiner to ask the question "Google Base, Where Are You?"
Well, Google hasn't announced anything yet, but I decided to do some investigating myself to see what I could find. I found exactly what I was looking for — so my answer to Iana is: "right here". The inclusion of "/base/s2" in the robots.txt soon after Google's announcement led me directly to the coming product.
The new search tool has two new result formats to choose from — grid and map — but personally I'm not in love with either of them. They all seem disorganized to me.
If this is supposed to be used to search for products, I'm confused about the inclusion of things like MySpace pages that don't sell anything. Searching for "iPod" is completely useless if you are looking to purchase one.
With that said, I am sure it's still being worked on, so I'm not going to give it a thumbs up or down until it is officially launched.
Garett Rogers is employed as a programmer for iQmetrix, which specializes in retail management software for the wireless industry.
See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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