Froogle – What is it good for?Written by Ed Kohler
Have you been to Froogle yet? It’s a new product search engine from Google. It’s actually existed for almost a year now, but it only went live as a link from Google’s homepage in past month. It's quite possibly greatest online marketing tool for retailers ever invented.What is Froogle? Froogle is a product specific search engine that indexes catalogs of online retailers and compiles information for their users. Search for DVD Players, and you’ll come up with 37,000 options as of this writing. You can then filter down to DVD Players between $200-300 and still have 581 choices. Want a DVD/VCR combo? Add VCR to search query to filter down to 209 options, and then sort by price with one click. That should explain power of this program for consumers, but how do retailers make most out of this by getting in front of their prospective customers for products they sell? The Froogle Feed While Froogle will likely visit your catalog, index it, and add products to their search engine, better way to go is to send Froogle a data feed. This is basically a text file listing your product names, descriptions, pricing information, images, and URL of each product within your cart. This will help Froogle accurately serve your cart's products with up to date pricing..
| | Your PC can contribute with Google ComputeWritten by Jakob Jelling
Have you heard of SETI Project? SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and project is operated by University of California at Berkeley. SETI monitors and processes radio signals from space, looking for possible signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life. SETI uses proprietary software to distribute computer processing power among all connected PCs participating in SETI project so that radio signals can be processed faster and more efficiently. SETI effectively creates one big supercomputer from thousands of connected PCs across their network. Now users of Google Toolbar can contribute to scientific research in much same way, through Google Compute.Google has teamed with Folding@home for their first project. This research organization is non-profit and based at Stanford University. They use participants' combined computing power to analyze genetic structure of proteins for medical research. Once installed to Google Toolbar, Google Compute can be disabled easily at any time. While enabled, it will use your computer's otherwise idle time to process computing work assigned to it automatically from Folding@home, then automatically transfer results back to Folding@home when complete.
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