Froogle What is it good for? by Ed Kohler

Froogle What is it good for? by Ed Kohler

Have you been to Froogle yet? Its a new product search engine from Google. Its actually existed for almost a year now, but it only went live as a link from Googles homepage in the past month. It's quite possibly the greatest online marketing tool for retailers ever invented.

What is Froogle?

Froogle is a product specific search engine that indexes catalogs of online retailers and compiles the information for their users. Search for DVD Players, and youll come up with 37,000 options as of this writing. You can then filter down to DVD Players between $200-300 and still have 581 choices. Want a DVD/VCR combo? Add VCR to the search query to filter down to 209 options, and then sort by price with one click.

That should explain the power of this program for consumers, but how do retailers make the most out of this by getting in front of their prospective customers for the products they sell?

The Froogle Feed

While Froogle will likely visit your catalog, index it, and add the products to their search engine, the better way to go is to send Froogle a data feed. This is basically a text file listing your product names, descriptions, pricing information, images, and the URL of each product within your cart. This will help Froogle accurately serve your cart's products with up to date pricing..

What does it cost?

Nothing. Submitting to Froogle is free, and you can do it as often as once a day (but at least once a month). Google has also stated that they plan to keep Froogle free by serving Google Adwords ads alongside the Froogle search results.

How do I build a Froogle Feed?

After signing up with Froogle, they will send you an extensive set of instructions on how to create a Froogle feed. If you have a small set of products, you could easily whip up a Froogle feed in a spreadsheet like Excel, then save it as a text file for upload to Froogle. However, if you have a large inventory with volatile pricing, youll probably want to look into exporting a Froogle feed from your database. One way to do this is to have your webmaster script a tab delimited file on your in-stock inventory so you can easily save it off and load it whenever you make changes. If you want to turn that up another notch, have your webmaster script your Froogle feed to automatically FTP itself on a regular schedule.

Get Froogling

If you have an online catalog and arent Froogling youre passing up additional sales. Sign up with Froogle today and get your Froogle on.

About the Author
Ed Kohler is president of Haystack In A Needle and creates Froogle Feeds for his clients. Contact Ed (kohler@haystackinaneedle.com) today to get Froogling.

Your PC can contribute with Google Compute by Jakob Jelling

Your PC can contribute with Google Compute by Jakob Jelling

Have you heard of the SETI Project? SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and the project is operated by the University of California at Berkeley. SETI monitors and processes radio signals from space, looking for possible signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life. SETI uses proprietary software to distribute computer processing power among all connected PCs participating in SETI project so that the radio signals can be processed faster and more efficiently. SETI effectively creates one big supercomputer from thousands of connected PCs across their network. Now users of the Google Toolbar can contribute to scientific research in much the same way, through Google Compute.

Google has teamed with Folding@home for their first project. This research organization is non-profit and based at Stanford University. They use participants' combined computing power to analyze the genetic structure of proteins for medical research.

Once installed to the Google Toolbar, Google Compute can be disabled easily at any time. While enabled, it will use your computer's otherwise idle time to process computing work assigned to it automatically from Folding@home, then automatically transfer results back to Folding@home when complete.

Users have plenty of informational and control options for Google Compute. A system tray icon (a double helix) indicates that Google Compute is running, and when bright, the same icon indicates that processing work is being performed. There are two modes available to help prevent interference with other programs that you use.

Google Compute requires Windows, IE5 or higher, 64 megabytes of RAM minimum, and the English version of the Google toolbar. A high speed internet connection isn't required, but you should routinely connect to the Internet every few days, and be prepared for a delay while the processed data is uploaded. Data is transferred using outbound HTTP, so it will work through most semi-transparent firewalls. About 20 megabytes per month of data is transferred to the Folding@home project.
About the Author
Jakob Jelling is the founder of http://www.sitetube.com. Visit his website for the latest on planning, building, promoting and maintaining websites.