FROOGLE….Here’s an intriguing new item that I just noticed (although it’s been around for a few weeks): Google is beta testing a new comparison shopping service called Froogle. So I tried it.
The test subject was a Nikon Coolpix 4500 digital camera. Enter the search terms and you get the screen on the right, which returned 5,847 results. Yikes!
There doesn’t appear to be a “sort by price” option, but by entering a price range and lowering it step by step I eventually found one place that sold the camera for $404 and two others that sold it for $450. Not bad. But how does it compare to other product comparison sites? Pretty well, it turns out.
I tried the same search on NexTag, which doesn’t sort by price either, but since it returned only 39 results it was easy to scan them and see that the lowest price on offer was $472.
AskJeeves returned 67 results and it even sorted them by price. However, the lowest price it found was $500.
So, based on one quick test, it seems like it has potential. The comparison information wasn’t as good as its more established competitors, but on the plus side it returned a lot more hits and found a much lower price. It’s worth a look, especially since it will undoubtedly get better when it goes live after the beta testing is finished.
UPDATE: Alex Salkever tried it out too and wasn’t as impressed. His report is here.
