14 DAY TRIAL // Google Product Search, previously known as Froogle, received a new update allowing users to conduct a simple price comparison process with a single click. From now on, Google Product Search users who are trying to find certain products can compare prices, read reviews and technical specifications on a single page, blogger Ionut Alex Chitu reported a few days ago.
In case you haven't used Product Search, and this happens quite often since the service isn't too popular these days, the application previously redirected you to the store selling the product, without letting you read additional info concerning the product. In addition, in order to read user reviews, the visitors of the website were asked to click on a special link which brought them to a "user reviews" page.
However, note that this new function is only available for certain queries so Google is probably conducting another test (Google Product Search is still in beta, so it shouldn't be something new that the parent company is testing new features every once in a while).
"Other comparison shopping sites like Shopzilla, MSN Shopping and Yahoo Shopping already have this feature and are more established destinations for finding products online. It's interesting that even Froogle used to include price comparison for an individual product, but the feature has been removed at some point. A mobile version of the site still waits for an update and Google Base needs more visibility," blogger Ionut Alex Chitu notes.
For those of you who don't know, Google Product Search was launched to represent an alternative to the already existent price comparison services like the ones mentioned above. On April 18, 2007, the Mountain View company renamed the product from Froogle to Google Product Search, probably as an attempt to insert the service into the company's Google product line.