Google has released a shopping search service. This morning's Washington Post had an article about it at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52946-2002Dec13.html
Web Watch by Leslie Walker Google Turns Its Gaze To Online Shopping By Leslie Walker Sunday, December 15, 2002; Page H07 Shoppers have a new Internet tool: Froogle, launched Thursday as part of the Google search service. Froogle (froogle.google.com) offers a price-minded glimpse of Google's vast Web index. Browse by category -- apparel, computers, flowers, whatever -- or enter a query term, and it will present a list of matching products, each with a thumbnail image on the left and description, price and retailer on the right. -- Anyhow I checked it out and it works fairly well. There's a big section in the About Froogle that describes how to sign up http://froogle.google.com/froogle/merchants.html Here's the basic info on how to submit a datafeed to Froogle (its from the same page as the above link). -- If you would like to submit a data feed of your store's product catalog to Froogle, email us at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please include in the email your name, title, phone number, email address, the name of your store, the URL of your store's website, and a brief description of the types of products you sell. We'll send you instructions on how to submit your feed. The first step is to create, in our feed format, a tab-delimited text file, which you can upload to us daily, weekly, or monthly. There are a few conditions and limitations you should know about if you're thinking of providing a feed to Froogle. This beta release of Froogle only supports U.S. online stores with English-language websites and products priced in U.S. dollars. While we plan to offer support for multiple languages and currencies in the future, we want to be sure Froogle offers the best possible experience to users and merchants before we expand the service. We will not be accepting feeds from international merchants until that time. Froogle points users to sites where they can buy actual products from the merchants that sell them. Therefore, to be eligible to submit a feed, you must sell products via your website and ship them to the buyer. If you sell services or custom products that do not have fixed prices, use your website only to promote an offline business, or are an affiliate marketing site, your site content may be crawled by and included in Google's web search, but it will not be included in Froogle. Nor will Froogle accept a data feed under these conditions. Merchants who meet Froogle's criteria and want to submit a data feed must allow Google to crawl their websites by removing any robots.txt files that disallow our Googlebot spider. -- I can see this being very useful to almost all on-line merchants and to the people who build the catalogs and online shopping carts. I think tomorrow I'm going to propose to some of our customers that they may want to participate in this. I can see how to set up the feed as a cfschedule event, and then upload the results to Froogle every few hours. At the very least its an extra selling point. regards, larry ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Archives: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/index.cfm?forumid=5 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/index.cfm?method=subscribe&forumid=5 Get the mailserver that powers this list at http://www.coolfusion.com Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.5
