Google’s Froogle: Is It There Yet?
- By Michael Stillman
You can find millions of books through a Froogle search
By Michael Stillman
There is a way to have your listings picked up by the world's most popular and powerful search engine, and shown on one of the most heavily trafficked websites in existence. They estimate that "millions" of people go there everyday. They will even pick up listings from your own website if you wish. So what does this site charge for providing this incredible level of visibility? 8%? 15%? 20%? Guess again. The answer is nothing. Zero percent. No percentage points, no listing fees, no cost-per-click. Nothing at all.
Welcome to Froogle, the shopping search service put out by the world's most popular search engine, Google. If all of this sounds too good to be true, it isn't. Google is an odd duck. They seem to be almost entirely focused on creating better products, not on making money from them. That may sound like a formula for disaster, but in Google's case, it has worked. They have made their primary product, their search engine, better than any of their competitors', thereby generating a huge audience. While other search engines focused on ways to sell listings, or at least advertisements that looked suspiciously like listings, Google focused on providing better search results. As a result, Google became far and away the most popular search engine. When they finally did decide to draw advertising revenue from their searches, they placed the ads to the side where viewers could clearly tell they were ads, not search results. It didn’t matter. Google's reach had become so great that advertisers rushed to buy this space because Google had by far the largest audience.
On December 11, 2002, Google launched its shopping site. In Google's typical, understated style, there was no great fanfare. While there must be thousands of shopping sites out there, most claiming to be the greatest place ever to buy whatever they are selling, Google made no outrageous claims. Promotion was minimal. They called their shopping site "Froogle", a clever play on the name "Google" and "frugal", and clearly labeled it as a "beta" site. "Beta" is simply tech talk for "still under development". To this day, Froogle is still labeled a "beta" site. Nevertheless, millions of books can be found through this site. Not as many books as can be found on Abebooks, not as many as on Alibris or Amazon, and naturally not as many as the meta book searches like AddAll can find, but Froogle is a force everyone in the book business needs to watch.
You might think this race is over. With the power of Google behind it, and the unbeatable pricing offered, it's just a matter of time before Froogle will dominate online book sales. Not so fast. In time, Google became far and away the most popular search engine. However, Google accomplished this by offering a clearly superior product. That cannot be said about Froogle, at least not yet. I would bet that most of you who are reading this article regularly use Google when you want to find information on the internet. I would also bet that few of you use Froogle when you want to find a book for sale on the internet. There is a reason. To understand why Froogle has not yet become the Google of internet shopping, you need to look at what Froogle is and isn't, what it does well and what it doesn't.
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Google’s Froogle: Is It There Yet?
- By Michael Stillman
Froogle finds many copies and editions of Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad.
First and foremost, Froogle is not a book listing site. It is not like Abebooks, Amazon or Alibris. It is more like AddAll, Bookfinder, or Used Book Search. These are meta search engines which search the book listing sites like Abe and Alibris and give you the combined results from all of these sites. You don’t list your books on AddAll. AddAll finds them because you listed those books on one of the 16 sites they visit. Likewise, you cannot list your books on Froogle. You can only list them somewhere else and invite Froogle to find them. That is similar to the AddAll formula. But surely Froogle, with the search technology of Google behind it, and the ability to search far more sites than sixteen, will do a better job. Again, not so fast.
There are limitations that come with Froogle’s essentially search engine technology. Remember, Froogle is a shopping site, not a book site. It is designed to find anything that’s for sale on the internet. Therefore, it can’t be specifically targeted for finding books. So, while Google may find more pages in total from the internet than just about anyone else, it does not find the most book listings. For example, Google/Froogle can only find listings that involve clicking on links. It cannot find listings that require you to type some words into a search box to find them. Now if you are a book site specific search engine like AddAll, you can design your program to take the words your visitor has entered in your search box and retype them into the search boxes of each book listing site you search. This is how AddAll finds listings on Abebooks, Alibris, and 14 other used book sites. Froogle cannot do this, since most of the sites it searches (non-book sites) don’t have author and title, etc., search boxes into which it can enter information. So, it only looks at what it can see without typing words in a search box.
It’s not that Froogle doesn’t want to find these listings. It even provides a form where you can enter listings to help it find them in case it cannot find them on its own. However, if the book site does not wish to go to the trouble of making sure its listings are compatible with Froogle’s technology, or maybe doesn’t even want Froogle to find them, then Froogle will not. This is why Froogle, which views many more sites than AddAll, does not find nearly as many listings. You can put up a site which lists 500 books, notify Froogle and conform to their requirements, and Froogle will find your books. AddAll will not find them unless you also post them on one of the sixteen sites they visit. However, since Abebooks’ 50 million listings do not conform to Froogle’s requirements, but can be searched by AddAll, that’s a 50 million books head start that AddAll has on Froogle. It would take an awful lot of small book sites to make up that difference.
Next, there is an advantage that the book listing sites have over any meta search that searches for more products than just books. The book listing sites were designed specifically for books. Froogle was not. It was designed to help sell practically everything: electronics, flowers, food, toys, car parts, sporting goods, etc., and, of course, books. Would you have a field for author or title in a book search engine? Undoubtedly. For publisher or publication date? Maybe. How about in something that also searches for flowers and food? Would you have a field for author and title? Not likely. So score one major advantage for the book sites. What Froogle can offer is essentially a keyword search. Compare that with an Abebooks or Alibris where you can narrow your search to a particular title by a particular author published in a certain year by a specific publisher. Froogle cannot do this. The only fields that can be separately searched on Froogle are product name and product description. Abebooks and Alibris allow you to search author, title, ISBN, publisher, date and keywords, or any combination of them. With Froogle it’s product name, description, or both. For a very rare title, a keyword search may be sufficient. If it’s a classic book with many later reprints, finding an early one can be very difficult with Froogle’s limitations. Interestingly, the meta book search sites are also fairly limited, offering only title, author and keywords. Evidently the different fields offered by the various book listing sites they search limit them to searching only the basic fields that all book sites offer.
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Google’s Froogle: Is It There Yet?
- By Michael Stillman
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Froogle does allow you to search only within the field of "Books", but on Abebooks, that's an automatic limitation, and Alibris allows for that selection. Froogle also allows you to search certain specific categories, such as biography, but when you get back a list of 32,000 items, this isn't of much help (a keyword search on Abe for "biography" brings up 1,716,210 responses) .
If you go to Froogle and search its "books" category, you will find whose listings they are picking up. This does not necessarily mean that all of their listings are being found, though surely some are. Froogle finds its listings in two ways, one by submission, the other by searching the internet on its own. Any titles a site submits to Froogle in the proper form will be found, but others may or may not be found depending on whether the Google search engine can spot them on its own.
Alibris shows up as a site Froogle finds. Surprisingly, it says it finds only 329,000 listings, not many for a site which claims over 40 million books. This can partly be explained by the way Alibris lists books, with many copies appearing as a subset of the main listing. As a result, Froogle may be finding only 329,000 different listings, but a much larger number of individual copies. Still, this seems too few and I cannot determine whether Froogle is finding only some of the Alibris books or giving a short count. On the other hand, if you search for listings from Abebooks, you will find nothing on Froogle. This, obviously, is a shortcoming for Froogle since Abe, at 50 million, is still the largest listing site in the world for old books.
The ABAA (Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America) makes its listings available to Froogle. Froogle counts 367,000 listings from their site. The ABAA site is not massive in its quantity of books, being limited to listings from its 470 members. However, they do offer many rare and more valuable titles that are not posted on the massive listing sites. Since the ABAA does not have one of the more highly trafficked websites, being included in Froogle may help them reach more buyers with their unique listings.
Another of the smaller listing sites that may get a boost from being found on Froogle is Tom Folio. Froogle says it finds 75,000 listings from this site. Booksamillion shows up with 207,000 listings. Used Book Central shows 68,000
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Many individual booksellers with their own listing sites also show up. Powell's is the largest of the independents, and they show up as having 168,000 listings. Jonathan Grobe Books shows up with 11,800 listings. Wessex Books has 20,200. The Brattle Book Shop shows 710. However, most independent booksellers, including many of the biggest and best known, do not have listings from their websites appear on Froogle. If their books can be found, it is only because they are also listed on a site that Froogle searches, most likely Alibris, ABAA, or Tom Folio.
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Google’s Froogle: Is It There Yet?
- By Michael Stillman
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A search for listings from Amazon receives the terse message "Your search did not match any products in the Books category". Froogle then tells us it did match 8,630 other items, and shows us a fishing reel, vanilla candle, a hat, Macintosh software, a table, hair elastics, batteries, gym shorts, a Lizzie McGuire doll, WWE "Ruthless Aggression" figurines for those who find Lizzie too calm, and something called "Urban Decay Cocoa". Who says Amazon has strayed from its original vision? But no books from Amazon, not one.
However, Amazon competitor Barnes and Noble shows up. In fact, they show up 1,220,000 times. And Wal-Mart shows up as having 139,000 listings. This brings us to another point. While sites like Abebooks will find you primarily old books, Froogle is a mix of old and new, which will dilute the results for those searching specifically for old and rare books. And what about eBay? A search for eBay under "books" brings up the same message as Amazon. Froogle does not find any books on eBay, but does find 333,000 other items.
This brings us to a point about Froogle and eBay, or Froogle and any other auction site. Froogle only displays items with a fixed price. If you are selling it at auction where the price is undetermined until it is sold, they do not want your listing. So why are there 333,000 items from eBay? There's an exception. If your auction includes a "buy it now" price, Froogle is willing to list it. And one more point. It's possible that some of those 333,000 eBay listings actually are books. What the zero books number means is that no one has bothered to classify any of the eBay listings under the category of "books". This is another problem for a general search engine as compared to a specific book listing site.
Here are a few more limitations for anyone wishing to have their listings show up in Froogle. Froogle only accepts listings that are in English, and only accepts sellers who will ship their books to the United States. As they say, this is still a "beta" site, and they want to make sure it functions right before rolling it out to the rest of the world. This does not mean that overseas booksellers cannot participate. They can if they write up their listings in English and agree to ship to the U.S.A.
So what kind of a grade should we give Froogle as a book searcher? I'd say maybe a beta minus. It finds a fair number of listings, but is not well designed to pinpoint your searches. And, it is still well behind the major old book sites Abebook and Alibris, not to mention the multi-site meta book search engines, when it comes to number of listings found. While the number of listings searched can and will undoubtedly be increased in the days ahead, the inability to target such fields as publisher or date remains a weakness in the Froogle approach.
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Google’s Froogle: Is It There Yet?
- By Michael Stillman
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Froogle works best in finding relatively obscure items that you wouldn't know where to look for on the internet. Do you need a pith hat? You know, those rounded hats people wear on safaris, or at least, in safari movies. Where would you look for one of those? Answer: Froogle. It finds 23 primary listings, 20 of which are right on target. That’s enough to give you a choice of styles without overwhelming you. Froogle then provides a group of secondary listings, ones it is not quite sure whether they are on target. Many aren't, but you will also find a few more pith hats to buy in this group.
But, books aren't like pith hats. There are millions and millions of them out there, and you need to be able to target your searches or they won’t be of much use. This is where the book sites, specifically designed to search millions of titles to find the ones you want, have the advantage. Froogle simply isn't targeted very well for such a huge category as books.
So we conclude that Froogle is not there yet. It has not yet arrived. But, will Froogle one day evolve into a better book search site? Who knows? Google is a very quiet, almost secretive company. They carry a big stick, but speak very softly. Google will need to design a subsection of their Froogle search that's built specifically for books in order to equal the performance of the other sites. But, if they do, watch out. They have an enormous amount of web traffic, very skilled developers, and with a public stock offering expected shortly, will soon have lots of cash to spare. If they decide they want to be a leader in the book business, and that's a very big "if", it will be hard to stop them.
Any bookseller with a listing website who would like to see those listings show up in Froogle should visit this page to learn more: www.google.com/froogle/about.html. While Froogle may not be the best book searcher, the listings on your site currently may be visible only to those who go directly to your site, and that is probably only a tiny fraction of the book-buying public. Froogle may well be the best step you can take at this time toward increasing visibility. You will also find a downloadable set of instructions on how to feed your listings to Froogle to make sure they are captured in their searches. Go to www.google.com/froogle/merchants/feed_instructions_new.html to download the file. Alternatively, you can fill out the form on the following page and Froogle will send you instructions on how to proceed: http://service.google.com/froogle/merchant_email. You certainly can't hurt your sales by appearing on Froogle. And, if Froogle grows in importance in anything resembling the manner of its parent, Google, who knows? This could be the beginning of a rewarding lifelong relationship.
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