Froogle Information
Froogle is a price engine website launched by Google Inc. It is currently in beta test stage. Its interface provides an HTML form field into which a user can type product queries to return lists of vendors selling a particular product, as well as pricing information. The name Froogle is a portmanteau of the word frugal , which means thrifty , and the name of the company, Google . Froogle is, of course, pronounced the same as frugal .
Froogle is different from most other price engines in that it neither charges any fees for listings, nor accepts payment for products to show up first. Also, it makes no commission on sales. Any company can submit product information (via a " data feed ") and be included in the Froogle engine. Notably, advertising space is available for purchase to be displayed in Froogle in the form of an AdWords ad, similar to those in other parts of the Google network. This is, as elsewhere, noticeably separate from the main body of results.
Searches can be sorted by relevance ("Best match") or by price (either ascending or descending). You can also search for items in specific online stores (assuming, of course, they have provided Froogle a data feed). Froogle is only available for selected countries at this point.
Google formally announced Froogle in December 2003, after the site had been active in beta for some years. It is now also offered in Wireless Markup Language (WML) form and can be accessed from cellphones or other wireless devices that have support for WML.
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