Rebirth of Froogle

Everyone has heard of Froogle, Google's inept shopping search engine thingy, that I consider Google's first failure (followed by Failure #2). There was a lot of excitement when Froogle was first launched because people believed it would be the ultimate deal finder which it turned out to be anything but that. With a clunky interface, crowded results page and with less then great prices, Froogle never really amounted to much. Well just yesterday Google sneakily gave Froogle a well needed facelift in hopes to revive its struggling entity and compete with the likes of Shopping.com, Bizrate.com and others. I haven't had a chance to dig into how helpful the results actually are in comparison to previous versions, which is where the real test will be, but cosmectically its a big improvement.

Here are a few differences that I noticed:

First notice is the results page looks like a combination of a SERP from Google and your typical comparison engine. Next you will notice the Adwords Sponsored links are placed across the top of the page instead of crowding the page down the right hand side. This change alone makes the page and products descriptions much more user friendly.

Google has also moved from the text links to an actually compare prices button, another feature common among typical price shopping engines. Maybe the best feature of all is that the search query you enter actually returns the product you are looking for! What a novel idea!

Google could potential really put pressure on the other comparison engines, if they decide to evolve Froogle even more.