Saturday, November 29, 2003

BW Online | November 25, 2003 | These Sites Are a Shopper's Dream

BW Online | November 25, 2003 | These Sites Are a Shopper's Dream: "In October, Yahoo launched an even bigger initiative: scanning the entire Internet for product listings, though without returning pricing data. That looks like a broadside at Google's online product search engine, Froogle. Launched last December, Froogle doesn't offer side-by-side comparisons, but it does allow shoppers to arrange product listings by price. It pulls in hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month and is growing smartly -- and selling ads.

'We don't usually monetize beta products, but we do monetize Froogle,' says Marissa Mayer, director of consumer products at Google. While Google contends that Froogle isn't a shopping-comparison site but rather a search engine to help customers find products, analysts wonder if the search leader has bigger plans. 'If Google starts taking the online shopping-comparison part of its business more seriously, Shopping.com and the others in that group could have a big problem,' says Nielsen's Leathern.

The sector's leaders say they aren't afraid of Google. They argue that its basic search technology, called PageRank, might prove difficult to adapt to online shopping. 'With PageRank, the thesis is you can always rank the most relevant results at the top and the least relevant results at the bottom. In shopping, relevancy is a function of the user. Is it the brand first? Is it the lowest price? There's no PageRank that will solve what's in your head vs. what's in my head,' says Tolia.

Froogle's Mayer says its product does what it's intended to do very well, which is find products and not necessarily supply comparison features. And Froogle can perform the most important relevancy calculation, namely ranking product offerings by price."

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