Shopping Search Engines Archives

Cyber Monday: one of the biggest shopping days of the year. And Yahoo stores were down.

Naturally, anyone using Yahoo stores was quite upset by this.

We were having a record weekend and now this...What a disgrace for Yahoo to have issues on one of the most important days of the year. And they have NO ETA as to the fix...

Apparently, shopping carts were timing out. Small business owners are feeling the heat.

What is Yahoo going to give us back in exchange for losing thousands of dollars in sales? A free month?

We had better at least see a VERY large PPC credit with Yahoo to try and make up for this.

The news got heavy coverage throughout cyberspace, with one forum member reporting that a segment was even run on TV. It took about 16 hours to fix, and obviously, that didn't satisfy many.

The reason we pay a premium for Yahoo is to avoid situations like this.

I am extremely disappointed with their reaction (keeping us in the dark) as well.

"Unacceptable and completely unbelievable," they say.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

I rarely use Froogle as my shopping search engine but for some reason, I did this time. And like most shopping search users, I sorted my results by lowest price. I was looking for the lowest price on keyboard wrist wrests and filtered the page as such. The first result is a "Fellowes Premium Keyboard Mouse Tray & Gel Wrist Rests!" for only $0.99, now that is a good deal. But trust me don't click, it is a pornography spam page. Seems like Shop Priest is good at Froogle spam.

Why report this, because this is the type of spam that makes me sick. At least spam relevant pages. :) I reported the first case of Google Search by Number Spam back in May. Vertical search is cool, but when the big engines allow it to creep inside the main results, it has to go through the same quality filters or else you run into trouble.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Last night Google publishes a press release named Froogle Local saying;

Today Google announced the addition of local merchants' content to Froogle http://froogle.google.com. By entering the item you're looking for and your location information, Froogle will show locations nearby that offer the product and pinpoint the stores on a map. So, whether a user wants to order it online or run out and grab it for a holiday party the same evening, Froogle can help.

I tested it out in my area, by doing a search in Froogle Local on DVD Players, pretty neat.

Hey, what if you want to get listed on Froogle Local, well just go to the Froogle Merchant Center at www.google.com/sellonfroogle/ and follow the instructions.

Currently, I have only found forum discussion on this topic at WebmasterWorld and I would like to pull out a quote from one of the replies for you;

This is the first step towards the nirvana of mobile consumer comparison shopping:
1. Point camera phone at product in store.
2. Phone scans UPC or takes pic and OCR's make & model number.
3. Phone finds nearby stores with lower price on identical product.
4. You pick store, your phone gives you driving directions to that store.
-OR-
4. You still buy at the store you are in because the price difference isn't that great (or they provide added value).

Last week Gary Price at the Search Engine Watch Blog reported that eBay Goes Shopping and Acquires Shopping.com and then today the same Gary reports that Shopzilla Sold for $525 Million. Shopzilla is probably more well known from its Bizrate name.

The threads:
eBay to buy Shopping.com for $620 million at WebmasterWorld Forums and Shopzilla / Bizrate Acquired at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Yesterday I received an email from Michael Yang, in bulk, saying, "We are opening our site to the general public." Become.com is a search engine vertical focusing on the shopping niche. They have received some good PR in the past, so a lot is expected of them.

Here is the full email, for some reason, the email had a blank subject. To me that seems unprofessional.

Dear Become.com Beta Testers,
On behalf of everyone at Become, I would like to thank you for using Become.com. Your feedback has been invaluable to us as we continue to improve our service. Many of you made suggestions that led directly to new features, such as our recently launched spellchecking technology. Other suggestions are influencing current development. Thank you!
Starting today, you can use www.become.com without having to login.. We are opening our site to the general public with the world's largest shopping index of 3.2 billion web pages from over 40 million web sites. We have many new services in development and will continue to roll out new features in the future. If you would like to stay up to date on our progress, please sign up for our Email Updates service at http://www.become.com/email_updates.html. Otherwise, this will be our last communication with you as a registered user.
Thank you for your interest and support of Become.com.

Warmest regards,
Michael Yang
Founder, President & CEO
Become, Inc.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Jason Dowdell gave me an exclusive on a new patent filed by Become.com named "AIR" - affinity index ranking. Jason tells me that its going to provide much better results because humans can identify certain sites / pages that are high in rich content and then the machine learning algorithm takes that feedback and scales. He goes on to explain that "they're able to add the human touch to their algo in a way that scales because they're in a specific vertical - none of the other engines can do that." I believe they actually call some of these online stores and then add them to a special "reservoir". Jason adds that "google / yahoo / msn use the random link method".

Earlier today, we discussed that Become.com went Beta. Well, again, Jason Dowdell, provides the inside scoop with an entry he named Become's Got Talent. In that entry he writes that John Glick from Yahoo! has left Yahoo! to join Become.com. This is a big wow factor!

Also he notes that "Chris Kermoian, formerly of Alta Vista is the Vice President of Product Management and has some great new features in the pipeline for Become."

This sounds very exciting. More to come shortly on some technology advancements made by become.com.

Yahoo! was unable to comment on this as of yet.

Become.com Beta launched recently. Jason Dowdell has some inside coverage over at his blog named Marketing Shift, worth a read. And we have some forum coverage at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I hear exciting things about this new specialty engine. But it looks awkwardly like Google, but just yellow. :)

Become, Inc. is a venture-funded start-up that is building the next generation search engine for shopping. We are developing an innovative new search engine technology that will significantly improve the online shopping experience.

Jason Dowdell notified me this morning that he posted an exclusive interview with Michael Yang, the CEO of Become.com and founder of mySimon.com in April of 1998. The interview can be found at Jason's blog marketingshift.com.

redzone, a member at WebmasterWorld received an announcement from Shopping.com and soon after, Bizrate - about CPC price increases due out the 1st of February. In his post he said:

The most notable subcat increases are:

Electronics -> Flat Panel TV's - $.40 to $1.00
Health & Beauty -> All SubCat's - $.15 to $.50
Home & Garden -> Small Appliances - $.30 to $.50
Jewelry -> Watches - $.40 to $1.00
Kids & Family -> Strollers, Car Seats, Cribs & Carriers - $.30 to $.75
Office - MultiMedia Projectors - $.40 to $1.00

He also believes this is happening because merchants are using the free conversion tracking utilities provided by Shopping.com. His logic; now shopping.com knows how much your ROI really is and can rationalize taking a larger piece of your pie. He also adds that soon after Shopping.com's announcement, BizRate followed suit with an increase in CPC prices.

Christmas lists are one of those things that I always forget to do each year or at least don't do that well, as I know most of the things I want most of my friends and loved ones don't have a clue what they are all about (you want top search engine rankings, gift certificate to Google Adwords, and a new blog...what???). I know I have to be real, and a new service from Froogle was fun to find today to help make it easy for them. With the holidays upon us, it probably a good time to get something together to just to make sure you don't get a bread maker, or bag of rocks this year, or even worse socks.

This comes way for the Google Blog, and it appears some of the engineers over there decided to solve a long time problem of developing Christmas wish list the Google way...create one with Froogle that can be searched, created, and shared with many people.

Jason Shellen explains how to create your own Froogle Wish List:

Want one of your own? Just go to Froogle, search for a few things from thousands of online merchants, and click 'Add to list' for any item you want to add to your Shopping List. You'll need to sign in to your Google account or create one if you haven't already (if you have a Gmail account or Groups 2 login, you already have a Google account). If you want to share items, just click the 'In Wish List' checkbox and whammo, you now have a web page of your holiday wish list to share with friends and family. This year maybe I'll get iPod socks instead of argyle!

Now Jason, what are iPod socks? Funniest thing I have heard today that you can actually buy socks for your iPod. Cool! According to the the product description: Dress your iPod up in any one of six vibrant color socks, Just slide your iPod into the sock to keep it safe and warm. :) Slide it out to dock or change playlists. It's as easy as... putting on a pair of socks. Sounds pretty easy to me. Fun, and definately better than argyle socks. ;)

According to an eWeek article it seems as if Microsoft has launched a Shopping Search Service. Some believe the shopping search engine is at Windows Market Place, according to a thread at WebmasterWorld. I am sure the thread will develop over time.

There are reports at WebmasterWorld that they can not add more then 200,000 products to Froogle. "We have been successful in uploading up to 200,000 items. We have tried to increase it to a full 700,000 but it always seems to stop at 199,998 - 200,000 items," one member says. The thread says that Froogle says you can upload a maximum of 1,000,000 products, but it seems like these members are not able to go beyond the 200,000 mark.

Froogle announced last week (or around that time) that they are now offering its shopping search engine to the UK market. If your a UK merchant and you would like to sign up, check out the Froogle UK Welcome Page. To know if you qualify visit the Programme Policies (I love how they spell that), here is the FAQs page.

Forum coverage at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch.

There are some really great books on seo available today, but there are not many on the single topic of Froogle. Froogle is Google's search shopping engine, it allows you to find products for free and list products for free. Froogle is not the most popular shopping search engines but its an important one to be a part of because of Google's current grasp of the search market and because Google has been featuring Froogle on many of its pages.

I had the opportunity to review an e-book named Froogle Maximizer. This is the first e-book, that I have seen, that discusses Froogle exclusively. Let me tell you that this e-book is a very comprehensive but easy to read book. It takes you through what Froogle is and is not and it then tells you what you need to sign up to Froogle. After you sign up, it takes you through the steps of setting up a feed and ensuring that feed works correctly - I learned a few things here that I did not know before reading this book. It even gives you detailed tips on how to optimize your feeds to rank in the top positions in Froogle, which is very important. If you can achieve on of the top three positions, you will most likely see a lot more traffic and transactions then from position four. This is because Google features the top three products from Froogle in the Google search results page when it matches a Froogle like search query.

I recommend taking a serious look at this e-book if your in the shopping search field. Find the e-book at http://www.frooglemaximizer.com/.

The more the merrier. We have so many shopping search engines so why not launch an other. As Gary points out in the thread he started over at Search Engine Watch, AOL is going to release a new shopping search engine.

The engine will be named In-Store.com and should be live by next week. The current service can be found at PinpointShopping.com.

We have been hearing about local search over the past year or two. The search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and even MSN have been promising and providing enhanced local search options. The next revolution in local is by a new shopping search engine named StepUp.com. You enter in a zip code and then conduct a search on the product you are looking for. It takes a few seconds and then products start coming up. Not only does this site provide detailed information on the products (provided by the merchant) but it also shows you the closest places with driving directions to the store. In addition, they have fields such as "Quantity On Hand", "Product Listed", and "Product Updated" to help with your purchase decision.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch.

Froogle is now including products from eBay stores, something it has not done in the past. Conduct a search in Froogle on store:ebay, and it will display all products in the Froogle index from eBay stores.

View Large Image

CobaltLady from DigitialPoint Forums felt that this is a good thing, "Ebay store items will be in the upper tier." Respree, responded "To a certain extent, I think its bad. If a merchant has both a website (and has submitted a feed directly to Froogle) and Ebay store, duplicate listings will occur (thus littering the Froogle SERPs)."

However, there are dozen's of sites that contain the same exact product and have slightly or similar pricing and information. For one owner to have multiple store fronts is not abnormal at all online, or even offline.

A thread over at SearchEngineWatch Forums is currently in the process of discussing why one product result ranks in the Google main results, while other sites do not. There are dozens of theories as to why, one such theory is that they select a low, middle, and high range for the top 3. When I say low middle and high I mean price range. They pick the "best match" from these 3 ranges and display them in order of lowest price to highest price.

However, there is nothing like doing your own testing and data collection and analysis. Therefore, I have had one of my developers build a Froogle data collection tool. We will be storing results for requested queries and then I will be conducting statistical analysis with SAS and Excel to find patterns.

I will not be allowing the automated submission of keywords to be tested. If you would like your keywords to be tested, please submit them at the SearchEngineWatch Forums Thread and I will be happy to run tests with your keyword requests or you can add a comment to this entry.

I found this funny, SEO Chat happens to rank in the number one spot for "Nigritude Ultramarine" in Froogle, Google's Shopping Search Engine.

Do a search on Nigritude Ultramarine, and you can buy an SEO Chat thread for only $2.99! It seems like Froogle has crawled SEO Chat forums as if it was a shopping site and indexed most of its pages. The results below were automatically extracted from web pages. Price and category information are uncertain. [details]

In fact it seems Froogle has indexed 349 pages of seochat.

Good find SEO Chat member.

There is an interesting thread brewing over at SEO Chat Forums that discusses how to optimize your product feed and your Web pages to rank well in Froogle results.

The basic premise is that Froogle pulls from the top matches for the three price ranges. According to Syragon, this means that they are looking at the low, medium and high price brackets and pulling one from each bracket. The ones selected from each bracket are the ones that are froogle optimized.

So how do I conduct Froogle optimization?
Both Egol and Syragon from SEO Chat discuss what they have seen that works for their Web sites. Egol says, "If you submit a datafeed the content of your site does not factor into your ranking. Instead your ranking is determined by the content of your data feed. The title of your listing and the exact text of your item description are the important things." And Syragon adds, "They select a low, middle, and high range for the top 3. When I say low middle and high I mean price range. They pick the "best match" from these 3 ranges and display them in order of lowest price to highest price."

This thread is just getting started, so if your interested join in and learn Froogle Optimization.

Laura Thieme of Bizresearch recently posted a comment to the Froogle integration into SERPS posting on December 13, 2003.

This post just 'WOWed' me enough to give the comment its own blog entry, so here it is:

"February 15, 2004: An update on Froogle. We learned why we were not included in the Froogle database, thanks to Craig Neville Mannings team at Google. Our client, Board Games Express, has a url www.boardgamesexpress.com that has a word that adult filters would limit content from coming through. See the word in the middle of the URL? What a surprise this was! In fact, it turns out that many of our clients' corporate customers have also been unable to visit their web site. This has been fixed by working with various search engines and filters to consider our client's web site "safe". We've now been able to have several clients indexed by Froogle, all of which are performing well. Once Froogle results show up all the time, as they are now inconsistently showing up at the top of Google results, we are likely to have far better performance. Average sales are typically higher from Froogle than other search engine referral sales. We do not, however, have significant traffic from Froogle. That should change in the future."

This was posted by Laura Thieme of Bizresearch.

As we move closer and closer into an innevitable clash of titans (GYM) "Google Yahoo MSN" evidence of profit model emulation is starting to appear. An SEO Chat member pointed out the existance of Froogle Ads at the bottom of "Every" serp.

"Shopping? Try Froogle - Google's product search service. Shameless Self-Promotion" Is what it reads. I jokingly commented about Google actually having a sense of humor, but in all sincerity I think its a sign of things to come.

Interesting post by a member at www.seochat.com about "Froogle" results now showing up atop Google searches see: http://www.google.com/search?q=above+ground+pools At the top is aFroogle listing, this is a very interesting developement in light of all the ecommerce sites that were dropped by the Florida update. I know the 2 may not be related and I am excitedly looking into this as I type (Yes I can multitask :-) but I just couldnt wait to hear comments on this.
Cheers
SEO Guy