Google intends to "de-emphasize" its own Froogle shopping search engine, a Web site featuring paid listings from eBay and other online retailers. Google intends for Froogle to no longer be a standalone Web site; instead its listings would be absorbed by other search features, [analyst Robert] Peck wrote.That is sad. I have always liked Froogle and had high hopes for it ([1] [2] [3] [4]), but it has been woefully lacking in attention in the last year or two. Even so, I am surprised Google is deciding to shut Froogle down rather than improve it.
There are several other comparison shopping sites available, including Shopzilla, Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, Smarter.com, and mySimon.
[Found via Paul Kedrosky]
Update: John Battelle pings Google PR and gets the response that "Froogle is alive and well." This may be a denial that Froogle is going to be shut down, but it also could be semantic games with the present versus future tense. Hard to tell.
3 comments:
it will be really strange if GooGle delists froogle. Why r they not improving it ?
may be the business prospects or is it the technical glitches ...?
is it the first thing GooGle will pull down from its services ?
I find two ways to interpret this:
One, that Froogle was a pet project of a group of engineers who have since found something more interesting to work on. It seems to be a pattern of Google's to leave stuff in "beta" indefinitely (see gmail) which may be an unfortunate tradeoff from their minimal-management structure.
Two, they have something much bigger in terms of ecommerce up their sleeves.
Time will tell.
I am not a computer geek but I like to froogle thru google-not confusing at all-hope they keepit-what about google earth? I really liked that too.
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