Well, it's Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, when every patriotic American must either watch football or go shopping. If neither end zone celebrations nor mall garage traffic jams make your day, why not try Froogle? In honor of the kick-off (so to speak) of the holiday spending-splurge season, we've spruced up our online shopping engine to make it as easy as possible for you to find and buy the products you and your loved ones really, really need.
For one thing, we're going international. A few weeks ago, we launched Froogle U.K.; this week we're pleased to announce that German-speaking shoppers can now search for and buy products that are actually for sale in Germany.
And back here in North America, we're now offering Froogle Store Ratings, which let you check the reputation of online stores by looking for "Reviews" links or aggregated ratings scores in your Froogle search results. We've also improved those results by grouping items together so you can more easily compare products. You can even narrow your search by searching by store. And finally, to ease those nightmares about receiving yet another itchy wool sweater, our new Froogle Wish List is easy to create (just click "My Shopping List" to get started), and even easier for your friends and family to access and (hopefully) heed.
Mick Jagger once insisted that you can't always get what you want. This holiday season, the Froogle team is doing their best to prove him wrong.
Karen Padham
Froogle product manager
Thursday, 25 November 2004
Tuesday, 23 November 2004
I'm wishing
We release a lot of stuff here at Google, but this one I'm particularly excited about. Every year near the holidays my Mom starts asking me to tell her what I would like for Christmas. I'm usually bad at getting her a list, and more than once I've received argyle socks, but now I'll be happy to point her to my Froogle Wish List.
Want one of your own? Just go to Froogle, search for a few things from thousands of online merchants, and click 'Add to list' for any item you want to add to your Shopping List. You'll need to sign in to your Google account or create one if you haven't already (if you have a Gmail account or Groups 2 login, you already have a Google account). If you want to share items, just click the 'In Wish List' checkbox and whammo, you now have a web page of your holiday wish list to share with friends and family. This year maybe I'll get iPod socks instead of argyle!
Jason Shellen
Program manager - Blogger, and Froogle fan
Want one of your own? Just go to Froogle, search for a few things from thousands of online merchants, and click 'Add to list' for any item you want to add to your Shopping List. You'll need to sign in to your Google account or create one if you haven't already (if you have a Gmail account or Groups 2 login, you already have a Google account). If you want to share items, just click the 'In Wish List' checkbox and whammo, you now have a web page of your holiday wish list to share with friends and family. This year maybe I'll get iPod socks instead of argyle!
Jason Shellen
Program manager - Blogger, and Froogle fan
Monday, 15 November 2004
Blogging around the world
Since more than half of all Blogger users are outside the U.S., I recently took a virtual tour of blogs around the world from Armenia to Zambia. It is amazing to see that so many people create and update their free websites in such a wide variety of languages - all of them using an English-only version of Blogger. If these folks can create that much content working with a foreign language tool, what could they accomplish if Blogger were available in their own languages?
We'd like to find out. The Blogger team has begun the process of internationalizing our service. While the posting interface and some other pages throughout Blogger are not yet translated, they soon will be. Meanwhile, right now native speakers of French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, and Korean will see an increasingly familiar version of Blogger in their own languages when they sign in.
We're all super excited that even more people around the world will be able to put their voice on the web using a Blogger interface that feels more like home.
- Biz Stone, Blogger team
We'd like to find out. The Blogger team has begun the process of internationalizing our service. While the posting interface and some other pages throughout Blogger are not yet translated, they soon will be. Meanwhile, right now native speakers of French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, and Korean will see an increasingly familiar version of Blogger in their own languages when they sign in.
We're all super excited that even more people around the world will be able to put their voice on the web using a Blogger interface that feels more like home.
- Biz Stone, Blogger team