Froogle Gets Promoted

Am I the first, or last, to notice that Froogle is now on the Google home page and part of the tab bar on every results page? They've also added adwords to the side-bar (maybe that's been there a while, I thought it wasn't originally). I wonder if this is because it's 'ready' (it still says beta) or because of the moves of Shopping.com and Yahoo!?

Shopping search is going to go nuts over the next few months, and as I've pointed out recently I think it all ends with more and more integration of the selling into the searching, until it gets very hard to tell the difference. Amazon started the other way - selling stuff and then letting others sell on their pages and then adding paid ad links directly to competitors. The searchers will go the other way, first doing organic listings, then blending in paid (shopping.com is essentially 100% paid), then selling things through third party relationships that are like affiliate marketing (% of sale) deals, and finally selling things direct.

The big mix is probably great for consumers, but I hope the engines label the parts as well as Amazon does. I doubt they will. I also hope the competition ups the quality of pre-purchase 'how-to-buy' and 'what-to-buy' information. Froogle and the others right now are far from perfect in helping you decide what to buy, they only help find out who has something if you already know it exists, and mostly what the different pricing options are. Adding opinions and reseller ratings is critical, as the dedicated shopping engines have found. But it needs to go much further, integrating thoughtful editorial with pro reviews and human-edited lists of external resources. CNET has many of the best attributes of this type right now.

Update: Surprise - I wasn't first. Seth has it and says he got it from Alex. Unofficial Google's got it too. SearchEngineLowDown even tracks down the Google News Release with a list of the changes to Google and Froogle.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at March 29, 2004 10:32 AM