Fast Facts About Froogle

Froogle is a new “product”-based search engine that Google.com is currently developing and recently launched in beta phase. Froogle attempts to find the most relevant products based on your search terms.

In fact, Froogle does a pretty good job at finding products that match your search. It still has some room for improvement, but for the most part, you’ll at least find the results relevant. The best results are achieved when you search on a brand or model of a product.

Though it’s still in the beta phase, Froogle has enormous potential. As an avid user of Google -- yes! I’m a “Googler”! -- I am certain that many like myself will soon add “Froogler” to our titles.

How does it work?

Once again, Google has come up with a complex algorithm to retrieve the most relevant results from its Froogle database.

It seems Froogle not only takes feeds from independent online stores, but also that it spiders the Web to actively find products. These Web-sourced results can be less accurate -- sometimes these results are just price lists, etc. However, the products derived from submitted feeds seem to be very accurate. You can tell these types of results apart from the rest, as they’re accessible via a link that appears below the results list for that product. The link looks something like this:

The relevance of the search results is increased by Froogle’s advanced search feature, which allows you to narrow your search by price, occurrence of a specific keyword, phrase, and by category. The Froogle guys have also made it easy to browse, by classifying products into a hierarchical directory structure.

I’ll get into the details of submitting a feed a little later, but first, I’ll answer the question on everyone’s mind…

How much does it cost?

I was pretty astounded to find out that it a listing in Froogle is completely free. Ok, I’ll say it one more time, it’s FREE!

Now, I can’t imagine the free model will last forever, but by getting an early start, you might be able to enjoy a first-move advantage and generate some solid sales leads for you store.

What are the requirements to have your data feed accepted?

To have your feed accepted by Froogle, your online shop or site must meet the following criteria:

1. Located in United States
   
2. Content is published in English
   
3. Products must be sold directly from your website
   
4. Services are not allowed
   
5. Products that don’t have fixed prices are not allowed
   
6. Your site must be crawlable by their spider googlebot

How can you submit a data feed?

Before you start, you will want to review the Froogle Information for Merchants page located here.

Once you’re certain that you meet the criteria, submission is a fairly simple process. The first step is to sign up via the form located here. In a matter of days (in my case, just two), Froogle will respond with a username and password, and a link through which you can agree to the site’s terms of usage. That is, you’ll get all this if your site’s approved.

Once you agree to the terms of usage, you should receive within about a day or so, an email containing instructions on how to set up and upload your feed. This email will include a PDF with detailed instructions, a sample Excell spreadsheet, and a sample tab delimited text file.

They will accept your feed as a compressed file (such as .zip, .tar, etc.), but the data file itself must be a text file set up in the format Froogle specifies. Although the flat file system seems to be somewhat archaic, I guess this is the easiest and most universal method for them to use.

The formatting is fairly straightforward, including the following tab delimited columns:

Product Url Name Description Price Image Url Category Offer ID

The only columns that may need explanation are Category and offer ID. The Category refers to the category structure you use in your shop, while the Offer ID represents a unique identifier you might use, such as SKU or Product Number.

The service also allows you to add advanced columns to your feed, such as whether the product is in-stock, lowest shipping price, brand name, and more. From the looks of those extended fields, Froogle is probably looking to add more advanced search options in the future.

At the top of the instructions, Froogle provide FTP information to help you upload your data feed once it’s ready. They also require that you upload your feed at least once a month, otherwise it will drop out of the Froogle database.