If your Black Friday strategy is to shop online, Froogle can now help reconnect you with your local stores. Throw a location (zip codes work) into your search string, and Froogle divides the screen between results and a Google map. It's a Froogle Maps mashup. The local catalog is extremely slim, for this year, and Google is soliciting local businesses to pitch in their products for local searching. Interestingly, those businesses can do so via Google Base, rather than the traditional method of submitting a formatted product information feed to Froogle. This tie-in hints at a startling utility of Google Base, as well as a spectacular potential enhancement of Froogle with all kinds of local product. Now the rumored connection between Google Base and eBay starts to make sense.
1. What exactly is 'Froogle' all about? Ebay minus revenue? Honestly, Google should copy Ebay already and stop trying to hard to be create something new when the Ebay model is tried and tested.
What Google needs to do to outcompete Ebay is simple: use the Google search engine (Google.com) to promote products to be sold or auctioned through Google. All they need is a link that says "20 widgets available on Google Auctions" when you search for "widget".
Why do they refuse to do this?
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Seun Osewa