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Thursday, December 11, 2003
Sometimes it's Better Just to Google?
Searching for "rosetta stone mousepad," I had trouble finding such an item at Shopping.com. Sure enough, typing the same query into Google yields some exactly perfect organic results pages, including this one from the British Museum.
The fact that you don't always find what you're looking for may not creep into the aggregate stats we hear for e-commerce every holiday season. The same problem exists with site search on so many e-commerce sites once you arrive there... the hard-to-find item never gets found because the site search is wonky.
The responsibility for making things easier to find doesn't like primarily with the searcher, methinks. It's a joint effort between the shopping bots and the retailers themselves. It's probably just a matter of months before a great deal more retailers join with the Shopping.com's and Froogles of this world to do a better job of getting their "whole" catalog with full descriptions properly indexed.
Let's face it, if a product exists "out there," a shopping engine should be able to find it. Pricegrabber and Shopping.com didn't find this one for me.
And upon double checking the same query at Froogle gives you at least a couple of relevant stores selling this product, along with a photo of it. Click, buy, done!
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
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D'oh!
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