Google`s Approach to Online Shopping

written by: Simon Brown; article published: year 2006, month 08;


In: Categories » Internet » Search engines and SEO » Google`s Approach to Online Shopping

The main difference between Google’s shopping services and those in other major portals is that Google doesn’t get its hands on the money. You don’t buy anything through Google. Both Froogle and Google Catalogs function purely as directories to products, sending you elsewhere to get your hands on the goods. Google has no revenue-sharing association with e-commerce retailers (in Froogle) or mail-order companies (in Google Catalogs). The search results you get in both services are pure; preferred placement in the search results lists is not for sale by Google.

The inevitable comparison is between Froogle and Yahoo! Shopping. (Google Catalogs is unique and can’t be compared to anything else online.) Yahoo! Shopping is a virtual mall whose directory and search results list Yahoo!’s stores. Banners for featured stores hog a portion of the front page. All this is useful, and Yahoo! houses many of the most important online retailers in the business. Yahoo!’s search engine shows off some smarts, breaking down many searches into brand listings. It also has a nice price-comparison engine.

Keeping all the stores under one virtual roof has other advantages, first among them being a shared shopping cart and payment wallet. You can load up products from multiple stores, and then pay for them all at once. You provide your credit card and shipping information just once; the information is then stored on Yahoo!’s computer. AOL and MSN have similar programs. Systems like this are purchase-oriented, whereas Google is search-oriented.

Google is not (currently) interested in handling purchase transactions, taking payment information, or hosting stores. There is no Google Wallet. The Google shopping portal is a search engine that separates products from stores to deliver targeted search lists. Furthermore, it uses similar evaluations as in its Web searches to determine which products matching your keywords are most important and should be listed first. The results aren’t quite as startling as with a Web search, which often seems to know what you want before you do.

When it comes to buying through Google, through is the right word (as opposed to from). Froogle search results are like Web search results, insofar as they link you to target sites, in this case e-commerce sites with their own shopping carts and payment systems. Google Catalogs provides mail-order phone numbers and — where possible — links to Web sites.

legal disclaimer

1) Our website is not responsible for the information contained by this article as well for any and all copyright infringements by authors and writers. E-articles is a free information resource. If you suspect this article for any copyright infringements, please read the Terms of service and contact us to investigate the problem.
2) The E-articles directory team is not responsible for inaccuracies, falsehoods, or any other types of misinformation this tutorial may contain and will not be liable for any loss or damage suffered by a user through the user's reliance on the information gained here. Please read the Terms of service

Useful tools and features

Translate this article to...    Send this article to you or to a friend

Link to this article from your page   
If you like this article (tutorial), please link to it from your web page using the information above. Linking to this page, this is the only way to help us improve our service, the same time providing your visitors with a way to improve their online experience.

related articles

1. How to Use Google Advanced Search
Google has and Advanced Search page. To get to this page, you click the Advanced Search link on the Google home page. Use Advanced Search for any one of three reasons: You want to focus a search more narrowly than a general keyword search You don’t want to bother with the complexity and thorny syntax of search operators You want to combine more than one search operation As you see in, the Advanced Search page bundles many keyword boxes ...

2. Basic Information About Google Catalogs
Most of Google’s great ideas depend on behind-the-scenes technology that works invisibly to precisely meet information needs. But one Google service relies more on hard work and continual maintenance than great programming: Google Catalogs, a searchable directory of mail-order catalogs, is brilliant in conception and execution. And keeping it going must require a monumental effort of scanning. Unlike Google’s Web index, which crawls through Web sites and reduces their content to a tagged database controlled by retrieval algorithms, t...

3. Breaking Down Google Web Search Results
Other elements on the search results page enable you to understand the result, continue the search, narrow the search, or avoid Internet traffic jams when seeing the target page. Some of these features are present on every search result, and some exist occasionally. Here they are. Page description Remember when I said that the search result text wasn’t composed by the Google staff? Well, sometimes part of the accompanying text is so composed. If the search result appears in Google Directory (which is built by h...

4. How to Use Google Advanced Image Searching
As with Web searches, Google provides a collection of enhanced search tools on the Advanced Image Search page. Follow these steps to reach that page: Go to the Google home page. Click the Images tab. Click the Advanced Image Search link. The Find results portion of the Advanced Image Search page is nearly identical to the Advanced Search page for Web searches.The difference is that the keyword modifiers here relate to images by matching file names, cap...

5. A Quick Tour of Google
Google is far more than a search siteit has grown to be a sizable collection of services and tools, and the collection is getting larger all the time. No longer is Google a single search site; instead, it's a conglomeration of multiple sites. And no longer can you even call it Web-based because Google now includes software that you download and run on your PC. This article often refers to tools and services. Although there is a lot of gray area in the definitions of these two terms, generally a service is a website run by Google. So,...

6. Google and U.S. Government Searches
Arguably, the most useful of Google’s specialty search areas is that devoted to the U.S. government. Actually, this distinct search engine is both larger and smaller than the name implies. This engine is global in reach. At the same time, it reaches below federal government sites to the state and municipal level. You might think that this entire search engine merely replaces the site:.gov operator:keyword combination. Not so. In fact, site:.gov remains quite useful in the UncleSam search because the results pages dish up a hear...

7. Google Search Operators
Google allows you to search using search operators, special words and symbols that make it easy to get search results that match as closely as possible the information for which you're looking. You combine search operators with search terms to form a query, like this: zeppelin "Led Zeppelin" That search would bring back pages that had the word zeppelin on them, but did not have the term Led Zeppelin on them. Here are the common operators you can use with Google: ...