Google's comparison shopping supermall

If you haven't been to Google's product search (formerly Froogle), stop by this holiday. For one, Google is obsessed with speed. Fast loading, high resolution image pages, even when the merchants have crummy photos. No need to clunk through a blinky blinky banner ad riddled website, just zing on over to Google. When ebay crashed this past weekend, I spent more time on Google's shopping area because you could still access eBay listings, even when eBay broke down and gave the world nothing for hours.

0.11 seconds and you have your Zhu Zhu pets and compare across big retailers and small independents.

The default layout is a list view, but presto magico select the Grid Layout icon next to the "Sort by" and you have the nets biggest marketplace (I actually believe Google showcases those in the home country based on .com, .co.uk, etc. which I appreciate because hey, global purchasing isn't that spectacular.

Barbie Fashionista dolls are out there and at first glance Toys'R US has beat Amazon in the Glam version. But going into those two shows Google hasn't fully captured the pricing update by Amazon which puts Amazon in the lead plus they also have their Free Shipping Super Saver program. And Toys R US is out of stock, sold out. So how do we get them out of there now? Give me a way to be a good citizen consumer, with a verified Google account and put an alert button so we can notify that retailer with an inventory notification or a notice that it will be put to bed in 1 day. Amazon does that with its merchants, Google can as well




You can also view eBay products though it looks like eBay has alot of problems with their image handling and it's carrying over to muck up Google product search. Full of empty gallery thumbnails. Can't really tell why it's not loading, considering when you go in the product listing it has the thumbnail. Sabotage maybe? LOL


Comparison shopping is a pro-consumer benefit. Being able to scan multiple sites large and small is a challenge, but if anyone can do it, it will be Google and possibly Microsoft's Bing. Yahoo hasn't figure out what they are going to do when they grow up. Shopping.com and ebay.com want money for inclusion and with all those partnerships, it's difficult to understand whether those results are really that consumer focused.


note to Google Product Search Engineers: Find a better way to update inventories real time. When merchants modify their prices up or down it's not reflected. Maybe crawling might be better. Or allow for the site to ping Google to update their product pricing & selection

note to eBay: I noticed going into your site and not logged in you've removed the country location of these sellers. Nothing personal but I don't think that little detail is all that big that you had to remove it. Every gadget I clicked went to Hong Kong. I guess you needed the clicks.