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Froogle. Google. Frugal. |
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Tony Subia - Subia Creative
January 2003 |
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| An Initial Froogle Assessment |
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| Froogle is new (12/02). If Froogle fulfills its
mission, comparative shoppers will be thrilled. If that happens,
Froogle should be a success. |
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| If you haven’t seen Froogle yet…www.froogle.google.com.
It’s all about comparative product shopping. It is a product-exclusive search
engine that focuses only on products with set prices. It excludes services and
customer products that have no price point. |
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| Prompted by user’s specific product search query, Froogle
delivers relevant product results in a ranked order. No one knows the ranking
criteria except Google (Froogle) although we have some credible observations on
the basics of Froogle ranking criteria (which are likely to change). |
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| Affiliate Marketers are excluded, and not too happy about that.
On the surface, we tend to sympathize with the affiliate folks. Froogle seems
to make this distinction…If you sell and ship a product, you are an online
merchant… If you are a “middle-man” that does not inventory
and ship - you are an affiliate marketer. |
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| If “price comparison shopping” is the Froogle
intent, why should Froogle (Google) assume that an affiliate product marketer
can’t be competitive? If an affiliate can offer
price-quality-value, shouldn’t that value determination be exposed to the
online consumer? We believe it should and further feel that affiliate exclusion
is really a disservice to the ultimate consumer. |
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| We conclude this…If Froogle accurately performs with meaningful,
relevant and accurate product searches with viable choices, Froogle will be successful.
Those merchants that can isolate the ranking criteria and turn controversial issues
into advantages will have a decisive competitive advantage. |
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| Study Froogle carefully. Pay close attention to the information
they intend to provide the consumer. Give Froogle what it wants and place such
information in locations convenient to the Froogle spider. Froogle optimization
factors seem to be similar to regular Google except that PageRank® may be
less of a factor. |
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| Please read on… |
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