Goodbye Froogle

They dumped froogle because of Google brand.
May be they found that froogle sounds some other company copying google brand.Good move but i dont think just renaming will help the google product search take off.

Not REALLY fair to put the rebranded in the DeadPool - they are just changing their marketing strategies

if gmail was changed to Google mail it would still be ongoing.

Froogle HAD potential, but perhaps the term FROOGLE gave the impression of budget items - also, it was not that well designed or developed.

Searchers could just as well be satisfied using Adwords or the Organic SERPs or even local search.

A very smart move from the branding perspective. Froogle was the only google service without Google in the name + Froogle sounds like a copycat. It was time to kick this brand.

I use Froogle on a regular basis, I thought it was a generally useful service..

Never liked the name anyway

I don’t think the brand was really holding it back, we’ll see if they put any real effort into it now. I do use it, it’s nice for certain kinds of product searches. But there is just a laundry list of things that could be better and never improve.

Huh, I always liked Froogle. And as a marketer, not sure it was in their best interest to ditch the brand.

Yeah, “Froogle” going to the dead pool was in my comment over on the “Google Dice” post (http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/04/18/google-rains-on-stumbleupon-parade-launches-direct-competitor/#comment-1336895)

I’m getting some mixed vibes from Google… I think they are starting to stumble (pun or no pun).

I liked the name Froogle. But I can see the logic of keeping all of their “products” consistently named.

Jason Alba
CEO - JibberJobber.com

sorry, I meant to add:

Isn’t there googol-times more value in having the link-placement on Google’s front page over just changing the name to make it more vanilla? Even in your post you talk about the drop in use just by bumping it off the main page…. so from a branding perspective I wonder if they are really going to get value out of the change. Again, I think it makes sense but this isn’t going to increase the visibility or use of Froogle, er, whatever it’s called.

Jason Alba
CEO - JibberJobber.com

Finally this stupid part of google is gone! I never liked it, it just proves the fact more to that Bill Gates is taking over the search engine market!

I think it’s a smart move for them to re-brand the tool. It’s been done many times before…a company re-brands itself and then makes a new market push.

Froogle was a retarded name from the beginning. I am glad they have done something with it now. Traffic should increase. Therefore increasing the aggregate demand cuve to the right.

Microsoft could make google to join the dark force. This could happen in few years.

Microsoft
“You have the power to join the darkside”

Google
“No…. Do no evil”

Microsoft
“Larry & Page…”
(pointing)
“You must feel your force. I’m your father of your stock company. Take my hand!”

Google
(suffer)
“NOOOOO… this can’t be.”
(Notting)

Microsoft
“My shareholders help you create google empire!”

Google
“Arrrrrggghghhhhhhh!!!!”

Good product catalog normalization is a hard job. Froogle simply was never as good as Shopping.com, Bizrate/Shopzilla or the rest. They got a slow start on the catalog side, and once their catalogwas up to par they never put much promotional muscle behind it. As a result, Froogle is tiny in terms of traffic. Check the chart below comparing Shopzilla and Froogle.

Lastly, the big guys use Google to buy traffic… it isn’t clear that it would be in Google’s best interest to compete against some of their best customers.

Traffic comparison:

http://www.quantcast.com/traff.....p;domain4=

Froogle was always a piece of caca. I could never figure what it was all about. It didn’t compete with Yahoo Shopping. They should have built it into something similar to yokel.com

Any chance that Google Checkout will be next?

Manish & Stefan Hess have it right–purely a branding move. Besides–Froogle sounds more like a $1 store than something that I would want to use on the internet.

And I just used it yesterday. Had I known it would be my ‘last time’ I would have lingered for a few extra moments and caressed the screen as a tear rolled down my cheek…

Seriously, I think this is the beginning of the end for Google’s ‘coolness factor’. Remember when Apple switched from the 6-color apple logo to the all-blue or all-black version? They made some sorry excuse about it being because they were after a different kind of customer (corporate) than they had been chasing in the ’80s (personal use, educational, etc.). We know now that this was a heap of crap — Apple had/has no more interest in the corporate market than Starbucks has in my blood pressure health. (They really only changed the logo because a couple of weeks before, some association published a report that Apple was toward the top of a list of employers that were ‘fruit-friendly’ — they didn’t mean apples and oranges… and the rainbow colors made the link between the report and Apple’s marketing materials look far more than coincidental.)

Regardless, this is one of those changes that was made to eradicate the quirkiness of a brand that is seeking to distance itself from its own campy roots. It will be seen as a bad move in the wrong direction, two years from now.

What?? I use Froogle/Google Product Search all the time, every time I do any research on a new toy I hit Froogle first. I can’t believe the masses don’t see the value (pun intended) in it.

With Google, name of the product doesn’t really matter. Its the quality of product matters. Any name they keep, its going to spread across world in 2 days. Bloggers (like us) take care of that ;).

http://www.suggestusability.com

There are two constituencies a shopping search engine relies on: 1/ the stores who provide the data, and 2/ the users who search for products.

From the stores’ perspective “Froogle” is a horrible name, because it implies that Google’s users are, well, frugal. The least profitable customers are those preoccupied with price– they have little brand loyalty and are not likely to return to that store unless, once again, they have the best price.

I wonder how many of Froogle’s users would self-describe themselves as “frugal”. It’s not always perceived as complimentary.

Eh I liked the name froogle.

Clearly shows that Froogle was a flop product. They r just rebranding it!

I adore Google, but dumping the Froogle name is a mistake from the marketing perspective. Lots of good points raised by commenters above about why that’s the case!

But putting the front-end issues like marketing and interface design aside, the real problem with Froogle was that it failed at finding comprehensive product results on the backend. Searching for “blender” gave you some random eBay auctions, a clearance website or two, and just really poor product offerings with fuzzy photos. This is because of the way that shopping engines acquire data. Froogle, like many others, relied on merchants to manually update their product catalogs via feed. Here’s the current page for merchants to do that in the new Google Product Search (it’s confusingly branded as a division of Google Base):

http://www.google.com/base/help/sellongoogle.html

This system is akin to a search engine requiring that all blog owners submit posts as they update (manually pinging basically). The web would be a lot less content-rich if everyone had to actively submit content to portals instead of it being discovered automatically through pinging and spiders.

In April 2006, Google acquired Dulance, which was a shopping engine that could crawl shopping feeds automatically (in addition to offering other cool RSS features), without prodding from merchants. I’m not sure how that acquisition has since been incorporated into the new Product Search service or how well it even performs, but if they can use that technology to finally find a comprehensive selection of well photographed, detailed product listings from trusted merchants, Google will have the beginnings of a winner. Just glancing through current product search results, though, they haven’t made many strides toward that functionality. Searching for “cuisinart blender” and scrolling down to click “more” to view all stores with that product just reveals a few dozen retailers. I know that there are at least 100 excellent retailers for cuisinart blenders with inventories of all models, prices, and qualities, but this search doesn’t even begin to illuminate that.

Of course this lack of functionality isn’t unique to Google, it’s still missing in most shopping engines. The exciting thing is that with this name change, Google likely intended to bate our attention for what could be a string of innovations in the service… I’m eagerly awaiting whatever might be coming (but missing Froogle all the same)!

Al Ries and Jack Trout in “Positioning” write that using one product brand name to promote other products is “free ride trap”. According to “Positioning”, for ordinary people Google word means “search the Internet”, not the Google company.

So the idea to use Google word to create names for 40+ crappy products is wrong. Yes, these 40+ products take the free credit from the search product and make these crappy products look and fell better. But the side effect is that these products will just weaken Google brand in long term.

I tried Google Spreadsheets. I entered simple expression “=2+2″ and have been waiting 20 seconds to see the result. You can expect faster result on your double core 2 GHz computer. What is amazing, there are so many positive opinions here on TC about this product. For me, the only explanation for this phenomenon is “Pavlov effect”.

Could some marketing guru tell or explain who is right, Al Ries and Jack Trout or Google marketing dept.

Is the dead pool recycle friendly? I’m thinking of launching a comparison shopping site called Froogle…given Apple Computer’s oops I mean Apple’s recent success with Cisco I think I might be able to pull it off.

It’s good to see that Google fails sometimes.

Google marketing is wrong. Just as Yahoo did, they will slowly dilute their brand with more and more products that don’t live up to the original search brand.

Grzeogorz you have it right.

The idea to get a name so close to Google failed here. I think people look beyond names but actually what you get out of the service.

I hope they don’t rename Picasa to Google Photos.

I had to look up froogle when I saw the option in admin, hadn’t a clue what it was.

Its well cool and its free, unlike some others I can mention where you get better placed by paying for it such as kelkoo etc makes it harder for those starting out with a limited budget.

How do we upload products to the new system?

I liked the name and I will miss it!

That is a better name, searching on Froogle makes people seen cheap. Hopefully the selection of items improves, is always seemed to be a dumping ground fro sub-standard merchandise.

current Product “Froogle” is Useless.
If the product is same after changing it’s name it’ll not make any difference.

It knows in this blog the best services and products of marketing and advertising for web, I traffic, searchs and much more alone here for you.

If Google will put more focus on this service, I’m all for the change. It’s actually surprising with their marketing muscle that it has not been more of a challenger to the other shopping sites.

I like the way Google is trying to integrate their business tools; hopefully, this will be another step in that direction.

Froogle really attracts not much attention, even for the deal hunter. It’s the last web site I’d like to go, if I can’t search any deals or promotional products in other web sites.

Was wandering where my froogle went? I thought foogle was a great name for the service. Before froogle I usually used pricewatch, but since froogle took off pricewatch hasn’t been like it used to be. I liked froogle because I could usually find cheaper products than with most shopping based searches and I usually used google to find cheapest prices anyway. It is a great tool if you know how to use it and a lot faster than trying to just google it. I really don’t see how someone can say froogle was useless, but then again “you have to smarter than the pen to use it effectively”. From most of the above posts that I see most people did not know how to use the engine properly, I always found what I was looking for.

Froogle was really a flop product and I really didn’t like it and yeah its good to see that Google fails sometimes.

Anyways good move.

Lest we forget how neo-con Google is:
Google has sued Froogles.com, charging the rival shopping search engine with trademark infringement.
Hope they pay this site lots of money for fighting about something not worth fighting about!!!!!

dont understand why google’s home page so reluctant to promote these services…after google answers now froogle…..google should find a way to promote those random services…..

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Good move by Google. Will certainly help them, since froogle looked like a fake copy of Google earlier when I heard about Froogle I thought that someone have copied Google like name and thenI I found that it’s official site for product searches.

Rahul Malhotra
(Chairman, http://www.jiffy360.com)

Think it was one heck of a stupid move, froogle was a great site, always usefull in helping me find what i was looking for. Think the whole google craze itself has died down, it only caught on because its a funny word. In my opinion its probablyt not the smartest move this company has ever made. And to all those who feel its nessacery to correct others spelling just o ou can post somthing, guess what i dont care if my spelling is not correct.

I thought “Froogle” was a great name - clever and witty. They should have stuck with it. More proof that corporate hacks don’t have a sense of humor or style. The name would have worked fine if they had actually invested any effort or money in promoting it.

Poor Froogle, we’ll miss you. Great name, agree with Guy.

I am really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really annoyed taht FROOGLE is gone….. Please Explain!

Froogle may have been lame as far as the name went, but it listed many more products than the new Product Search. Now, if it’s not part of Google Checkout, it won’t show up. Buh!

man thats so fucking gay i cant belive its getting takin off ill kill u google! i will freaking slit your throat!!!!!!!

I LOVE FROOGLE!! WHY DID YOU GET RID OF IT! I BOUGHT MY AWESOME GRIPMASTER FROM FROOGLE!!