As comparison-shopping sites soar, Froogle's a flop.

[regic]

'Tis the season for comparison-shopping Web sites to help consumers find the best deals in cyberspace. As the holiday buying season comes to a head, three top contenders are poised to duke it out for pay-per-click gold--but Google isn't one of them...

...Google's  Froogle will likely garner nothing but a lump of coal, although an announcement about Froogle enhancements is expected shortly...

"Google has frustrated the hell out of merchants, and the company hasn't committed people or resources to working on it," Smith says, adding that this frustration may keep some of the best deals off Froogle's search results. ..

full article: http://www.forbes.com/business/2005/11/1...artner=rss

[bargainbloodhound]

Just reading the title of this I would have to agree, and its the primary reason I'm not jumping up and down with excitement at the opening of Google Base and thinking its mere opening makes it a world beater.  Google SEARCH is great for bringing visitors/buyers to my stores but I'm lucky to get 1 visitor a day from Froogle.

Google is a world beater in search, but that doesn't necessarily mean everything it does brings the same results as attested to by the dismal showing of Froogle nearly 3 years after its introduction.

People forget that the Yahoo site receives more than twice as many monthly visitors as Google does...and while Yahoo might be great at some things everything it touches doesn't turn to gold--and Google is no different, it is a great SEARCH ENGINE but it has yet to achieve the same world-beater status in all of its other endeavors (as attested to by the fact that Yahoo gets more than twice as many total visitors).

"Google has frustrated the hell out of merchants, and the company hasn't committed people or resources to working on it,"

Yes it has frustrated Merchants, and I think people forget this because they want to believe the world has suddenly changed because Google is making a move into the classifieds market.  The more heavily trafficked Yahoo has long had a classifieds site and the success of the Yahoo site has never translated into success for the Classifieds site (or Auctions for that matter either).

Only time will tell if the new Base will achieve the same success as Google Search or whether it will be a distant also-ran like Froogle or Yahoo Classifieds.