Froogle nuts & bolts

Questions for Froogle's Mastermind, Part 1: "Questions for Froogle's Mastermind, Part 1"

Froogle is Google's shopping search engine.

Rated very user-friendly shopping experience

Users can view search results in a list or a grid format

List view gives the product photo, product name, price, description, and link are displayed in each search result
Grid view appears with only one click & shows more product photos on one screen.
Search results can be sorted from low-to-high or high-to-low prices & you can set a price range

Nevill-Manning (CNM) : Our two overriding aims in developing Froogle are comprehensiveness and ranking quality... Froogle uses the same business model as Google -- no money changes hands in order to appear in the results, and we sell clearly marked ads on the side of the page.

Other shopping search engines have a quandary: If they charge merchants to be involved, then they can't be comprehensive. If they include others at no charge, they remove the incentive to pay for inclusion. If they take a middle road -- show the paid results first, then the unpaid results -- then relevancy suffers. With Froogle, we give away lots of valuable traffic to merchants for free but end up with a higher-quality user experience...

Ranking is done using a function that is based on the Google ranking but is tuned especially for Froogle, making use of the structured data that is unique to Froogle: name, description, price, image, etc.

Apart from comprehensiveness and ranking quality, we apply the Google formula of a simple user interface and fast response times...CNM: We have no plans to move either Google or Froogle to a paid inclusion model, for the reasons I outlined above. If you provide users with the best possible experience, it's possible to monetize it with clearly marked, highly relevant ads.


ST: Why do some Froogle search results show above Web page matches on Google?

CNM: For a fairly small subset of queries that we strongly believe indicate users are looking to purchase a product, we show three results above the Web results. They are intended to help people get the information they need as quickly as possible -- just as we show results from News or Local Search if we detect that it might be helpful.

CNM: We have a long list of features that we'd like to add to Froogle, but we'd like it to be a surprise.