Alphabet Inc (GOOG)

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Shopple til you Dropple!

Holiday treasure hunt
Google provides shoppers local tips plus maps to stores
Verne Kopytoff, SF Chronicle, 11/22/05

Just in time for the holidays, Google Inc. has updated its comparison shopping engine to allow users to find products from local merchants and map trips to the store.

The goal is to make the engine, dubbed Froogle, more comprehensive and a bigger research tool for people who want to buy products in stores in addition to online.

Local listings are a key battleground online as companies vie for a piece of what has historically been dominated by the Yellow Pages. Other local product search engines include Cairo.com, a San Francisco startup; TrueLocal, in Canada; Verizon's SuperPages.com; and San Francisco's technology Web site Cnet.

To get results from local stores at Froogle, users must type in a product's name and a location such as San Francisco or a ZIP code. They then get a list of where the product is normally available, the price and a map showing the stores' location.

Initially, product inventory lists will be provided by a contractor. But Google is also asking that merchants submit their own lists through its new Google Base, a searchable database of everything from school reports to job ads to pornography. Google ultimately expects to include items from the database in the Froogle index.

As it is, the listings from local merchants are relatively modest. A search for "tennis racquet" and "San Francisco" produced only a handful of results across the Bay Area that didn't include any racquets at all. Instead, it showed a tennis racquet bag and tennis pasta from only a handful of merchants.

Lorrie Norrington, chief executive officer for Shopping.com, a comparison shopping site in Brisbane that is owned by eBay, said Google's update to Froogle doesn't do much to help consumers shop online. She said that "the bells and whistles are fun to talk about" but that her internal research shows that shoppers primarily want ease of use and to buy from trusted merchants.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/11/23/GOOGLE.TMP