Froogle Struggling?
Brian Smith from ComparisonEngines shot me an email this morning with two links to his recent Froogle posts that indicate the struggle Froogle's having both with spam and local.

In Froogle Spam, Brian searches Froogle for ipod nano and finds that, besides the fact that he got results for the iPod video, "the results are made up of spam and eBay affiliate listings. Almost every single store listed on the first 9 pages (90+ results) link to spam or outdated (and therefore incorrectly priced) ebay affiliate listings through a basic landing page."

In Froogle Local Follies Brian digs into searches on products or company names that include a city name, such as Yakima (city in Washington + adventure gear company). Froogle's getting them confused. Brian quoted a Yakima company representative as saying, "When you do a froogle product search for say; Yakima Lowriders, you are automatically taken to the Local Shopping area to search for lowriders in Yakima Washington - where you are told there are no products matching your query."

Brian also linked to some of Froogle's mounting struggle in the msm:
Google's Empty Stocking (forbes)
Froogle: Shopping Made Complex (businessweek)

Oh, and I saw this Froogle ad in MySpace when I was checking out their classifieds:

Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |