The New Yahoo!, Google, MSN Et Al. Battleground 158
A reader writes: "Kelkoo sold to Yahoo for 575 million dollars!" That, in and of itself is not that interesting - but combine that with Google's inclusion of Froogle into the front page, and things become more interesting. The comparison shopping field, including places like PriceGrabber (Disclaimer: OSDN is an affiliate of PriceGrabber) in the US, Kelkoo/Yahoo! overseas, Froogle, and MSN is heating up in competition. Now that search has been monetized, the next battleground for big money is in comparison shopping, beyond MySimon and other smaller ones.
Help Yahoo? (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
What I'd actually like to see is a search engine that can tell which companies will ship to my home country, and work out the actual price of the product based on shipping, currency conversion and possibly import duties payable. That would be a lot more useful than a single-country search system, particularly when I don't live in that country.
Re:who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
In any case, I think the real winners in this one are going to be those of us that figure out how to leverage these services for our online shops.
This is going to be a good holiday season
resellerratings.com (Score:5, Interesting)
Sometimes buying the cheapest items (e.g. from a pricewatch search) spread across different stores costs more when you are done than if you were to take a different approach and lump some of the purchases together.
another neat tool for amazon only is pricenoia [pricenoia.com] some products might be cheaper overseas even after shipping/exchange rate.
*shrug* YMMV,
e.
Yahoo (Score:5, Interesting)
Heh, nothing worse than trying to get stuff done and having to use a site that's just got too damn much on it.
Re:who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
once you have that sort of name recognition, its damn hard to lose in the marketplace...
That's a bad thing not a good thing. The brand Kleenex is so diluted now that it simply means tissue. How'd you like it if you owned Kleenex and then heard everyone call every tissue Kleenex? All those tissues are benefitting from your trademark and you get nothing in return. That's why Google fought Webster's to have the verb form of Google taken out of the dictionary. They want to protect their trademark; not give it away to the public.
Re:The future of search. (Score:5, Interesting)
To be useful, for me it had to be:
- Extremely low on the cpu
- keep the database small (10'000 webpages in 50MB or less)
- fast. Let me search in 2seconds tops.
Anyobdy already working on this?
What is the point? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The future of search. (Score:3, Interesting)
Good idea, however it might be cooler if users were able to personalize google with their own name/pass and then it remembers where you've been on their end. (Maybe up to n-sites, n being greater than 5,000.) The more client-side data I have to tote around the more pain in the ass it becomes. I'd rather be able to get such features anywhere.
The web needs to incorporate a Nielsen Ratings system.
This idea I like also, but there's a big flaw in your solution. It is a little too slashdot-like. Not to say that slashdot doesn't have an excellent moderation scheme, but do I really want to rely on such a thing for data searching? Probably not. All too often comments get modded to 5 even though they are filled with erronious facts or lies. I'd prefer my searches to be as objective as possible.
Re:Google makes a move, many moves (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What I'd like to see in a shopping search engin (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Google makes a move, many moves (Score:2, Interesting)
MSN hinted today [mediapost.com] that it will be offering an online music service as well. I wonder if Google or Yahoo will follow suit...
Not interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
The must have a helluva cash flow to justify that kind of pricetag.
Froogle? (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess they don't believe in the global Internet economy.
Re:who cares? (Score:2, Interesting)
If you make bad decisions and your competition makes better ones, you'll end up losing someday. Look what happened in the war Intel vs AMD. Ofcourse you'll have quite a lead on the competition if you can spend, say, $10 BILLION making your product but nevertheless. If you keep making crap and the competition keeps on making a better product for a competitive price, you'll lose eventually. If you got heaps of money and a big propaganda machine like a certain Redmond company, that will probably be later, but at some point people will have had enough of buying crap for a high price when they don't really have to.
Getting back to the google-stuff for a while, I remember a time when altavista was the only search engine anyone wanted to use or at least pretty damn close.
Froogle Spamming? (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe that's why Froogle lists results by some secret "Best match" algorithm, but I suspect it would pretty quickly become the next target of rogue merchants, especially because Froogle has a consuming-oriented audience. We'll can only wait and see how Google's smarties fight back; maybe they'll created a database of trusted merchants, the way Google News works [google.com].
price grabbers DOS web sites (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:But what's so bad about that? (Score:5, Interesting)
The free advertising is great, the problem comes when your quality name becomes widely associated with shoddy products.
Example (completely fictitious and anecdotal): You spend a lot of time and resources to ensure that your Trampoline(tm) brand exercise products are fun and safe, but you don't pay enough attention to keep your trademarked name secure. The Profit-From-Kidz corporation releases a line of shoddy trampolines responsible for the deaths of 35 tots (really cute, photogenic tots). Global headlines trumpet the dangers of "trampolines", the market collapses, your company folds. If your trademarked name had been protected, headlines about the dangers of the Profit-From-Kidz Suspended Exercise Spring Mat would have had much less impact on your business.
Why do you think the makers of a certain type of interlocking construction toy are so rabid about protecting their trademarks? [lego.com] The PR difference between a headline about a child choking on a "construction brick" and a child choking on a Lego(tm - please don't sue me) is huge.
The Dalai Llama
when my cult goes international, I'll want 25 cents everytime somebody says llama...
Re:who cares? (Score:1, Interesting)
Froogle. (Score:2, Interesting)
Now where is that Froogle API? (Score:3, Interesting)