Froogle: Shopping Made Complex

It's not hard to see why the test version of Google's shopping service has yet to gain widespread acceptance -- but it does show promise

by Robert Hof

Editor's Rating:

The Good: Fast searches, nice integration of local searches with Google Maps

The Bad: Limited filtering tools, sparse local product listings

The Bottom Line: Helpful, but needs more of a human touch

Reader Reviews

Google's (GOOG) shopping service, Froogle, turns three years old this month. That's nearly an eternity online. Yet all that time hasn't helped the site gain much ground in the hotly contested field of comparison-shopping sites. Froogle's market share trails well behind others, such as eBay's (EBAY) Shopping.com, E.W. Scripps' (SSP) Shopzilla, and Yahoo! (YHOO) Shopping.

Along with the nearly forgotten social-networking site Orkut, Froogle is one of the prime examples of Google failing to move much beyond its stronghold in paid search. It's not hard to see why.

Despite sporting Google's customary speed and some attractive features, such as the ability to find products in local stores, Froogle still can't match the leaders in what really matters: quickly researching and finding just the products you want. I took a closer look at Froogle as part of a series of reviews of Google features and tools (see BW Online, 11/30/05, "Google Tops the Charts").

Froogle's first challenge is one of the very things that made Google so popular: a starkly simple starting page. It sports little more than a search box, plus a random list of often-obscure products, from "voltmeter" to "mulch," that other users recently found through the site.

FOLLOW THE MENU.

Why that list is there, beyond showing the wide variety of stuff you can find through Froogle, escaped me -- especially when I clicked on "mulch" just for fun. One of the results was a photo of cypress bark mulch -- mine for $195! No thanks.

By contrast, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and for that matter most online retail sites offer a useful list of categories on their home pages, often with sample products. That way, if you don't know precisely what you want, you can follow the menus quickly without being forced to type exactly the right combination of words at the outset.

Especially during the holidays, I like seeing other categories and products without having to think of them myself. It gives me ideas for gifts I wouldn't have considered otherwise. I'll take a little more clutter in exchange for serendipity.

DRILL DOWN.

Once you start digging deeper on particular products, you find that Froogle has some valuable shopping tools. I tested the site by doing searches on several sample products. First up: a search for "Sony digital camera."

At first glance, the results on Froogle look useful enough. There's a neatly laid-out list of Sony (SNE) cameras, with photos. There are also several columns of filters, so you can choose by price or a particular store, or see related searches to drill down more specifically. Click on one of the listings, and you get a product description and rating, followed by a multipage list of stores from which to buy the product, starting with the lowest-priced offering.

When I did the same search on Shopping.com, however, the advantages of the leading comparison-shopping site became immediately apparent. You can sort by a wider range of prices, megapixel resolution, flash function, and various other features, such as optical zoom. Unlike Froogle, Shopping.com makes you feel as if an actual human being experienced in shopping for digital cameras consciously set up the right filters.

When I clicked on some specific cameras, Shopping.com was helpful in sorting out the seemingly endless choices. While Froogle left me to decide for myself which factors were most important, Shopping had a single "Smart Buy" link on one listing that represented the lowest price from a trusted merchant. You also can compare several choices side by side on Shopping.com.

LOCAL LIMITS.

Next, I tried searching for "Ugg boots near Palo Alto" -- hoping to test out a new Froogle Local Shopping feature that finds nearby stores from which to buy a product.