What did Google do right when starting Froogle?
As most of you know, Froogle is what started the products portion of Google Base. Starting something like this from scratch and getting it to catch on isn’t an easy task, so they must have done something right. But what was it that they did right?
For starters, Google used their crawlers to pre-populate their new service. This showed some immediate value to the user, and it wasn’t awful. If you want an example of awful, MSN’s new product service is a good example.
Next, they started accepting feeds - free of charge - and placing those above the crawled listings. Of course, there is more confidence that the information is correct when the data is form a feed rather than from a crawl, so it made a lot of sense to place those higher. This got people excited about creating feeds.
Along the way, they started grabbing and aggregating store reviews from other sources, then coming up with their own ratings based on what they were finding. This has undoubtedly created some sense of trust within the listings.
Finally, they started incorporating the results into their heavily used organic listings when it made sense.
That is what I call a recipe for success.
Comment by NeO | February 14th, 2007
The good ‘ol days of Froogle
What if any differences have you seen between a Base feed and a Froogle feed?
Comment by Brian Mark | February 15th, 2007
Really, not much. The ability to do XML vs. flat files makes some fields easier to manage, but most of the submission is close enough not to even worry about it. The algo seems to be pretty much the same, too.
Comment by Nicolas | March 3rd, 2007
I’d like to know why you think MS Live Product Search is awful… Since Froogle dropped his SKU normalization, I don’t really see a major difference between the 2 services, at least not enough to consider one great and the other awful
Nicolas
Comment by Brian Mark | March 3rd, 2007
When I first posted this, the search for MP3 player showed 1 MP3 player, lots of plasma TV’s, speakers - full size for home stereo and not even for mp3 players, and totally unrelated products like stuffed animals. Over the past couple of weeks, since they discontinued Windows Live Shopping, they’ve really been working on refining the product results and they’re starting to come around. They’re still just based on crawls, though, which makes some of the pricing very wrong (list instead of selling price) and there are plenty of wrong images yet (accessories instead of the actual item.)
The quality is certainly getting better, and I’ve got to give them props for that.