Google’s shopping search engine Froogle determines relevancy in much the same way the Google engine does – but with a few twists, Froogle's director of engineering, Craig Nevill Manning, tells Internet Retailer.
“The standard Google ranking didn’t work as well as we liked for Froogle, so we modified it somewhat,” says Manning. “We started with the Google ranking. Then we mixed in some secret sauce from the Froogle side, which takes advantage of the fact that we have structured data such as price and images.”
Froogle gets that data from direct product feeds into engine by merchants – a free service -- and it also crawls merchants’ web sites regularly in the same way Google crawls sites.
Manning says natural results for the same search on Froogle and Google will likely be different. “Froogle has a much deeper crawl of shopping sites, and it also has a slightly different ranking function,” he says. “Furthermore, on Google, you may get reviews of discussion about a product, or the manufacturer’s homepage. On Froogle, you only get sites that are selling products.”
Marketers have spent time and resources to figure out algorithms and optimize pages for Google; now with 18-month-old Froogle beginning to gain a higher profile, optimizing for Froogle is an additional concern. But Manning insists merchants' best shot at ranking high in Froogle’s natural search results (Froogle, like Google, also carries sponsored links) starts with the direct feed.
“We want everybody to be included in the index, so if a merchant doesn’t give us a feed, we’ll do our best to crawl the site and understand how it's formatted in order to recognize prices, images and names of product. But we may not always get it right, and we may not crawl your site as frequently as you’d like for updating prices. The feed lets merchants upload a text file every day with updated information,” he says.
Manning also offers another hint to merchants seeking to optimize for Froogle. "When merchants give us a product name, the more standardized that name is, the better," he says. Under that rule, merchants selling a Nikon CoolPix 5700 digital camera, for example, should list it in exactly those terms, rather than using a longer description such as, “ Nikon CoolPix 5700, great digital camera, and five megpixels with three flashcards.” Says Manning, "That will be more likely to confuse our algorithms in terms of ranking and figuring out whether the item is relevant to a query. People tend to put fairly short search queries.”
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