Google Unveils Froogle Product Reviews

Online Product Rating is Big Opportunity
What is the best way to buy a product online?? Ask any online shoppper and invariably he will list out 5 to 10 tips of validating product and vendor genuiness. One of the item to come up in such tip is look out for product and supplier rating.

With online shopping growing year on year and some of the labour pains of online shopping portal, innovative ways to reinforce confidance in online shopping like - Froogle.

Wise Web merchants will start paying attention to the reviews their products are getting online, since more consumers will have ready access to those reviews -- thanks to recent additions to Google's online shopping engine, Froogle.

The new feature, Froogle Product Reviews, aggregates product ratings culled from the media and product-rating Web sites.

Froogle, of course, pieces its product database together by crawling the Web and integrating feeds from merchants. Search results typically show photos, prices, and the online merchant carrying the product.

Now, when Web users search for "digital camera" on Froogle, a ratings score appears beside each result, aggregating the product's ratings on Web sites on a five-point scale (similarly to how Metacritic.com gathers movie reviews and generates an aggregated score). Froogle also posts the number of reviews for the product.

Google's Search Engine Enpowers Froogle:
Key differentiator for Froogle from some of the similar services like Product Reviews, Store Ratings are culled from end-user ratings sites like BizRate.com, Shopping.com and ResellerRatings.com is the Google's Search Engine capabilities embedded and working behind.

Users can click on the rating or number of reviews to see a listing of relevant reviews -- and moreover, can then search within the reviews for specific phrases like "battery life," "photo quality," or "customer support." Shoppers can also sort the reviews by review source, relevance (Google's search algorithms determine from the search term) or by date.

Consequently, it behooves merchants to polish their reputations on those ratings sites -- ideally, by giving good customer service, which will then be reflected on those sites.

In addition to Product Reviews and Store ratings, Froogle also recently introduced a customizable shopping list, which can be shared with friends as a Wish List.