Friday, March 10, 2006

I Fixed Froogle

Last year, I liked Froogle. Starting around January, Froogle broke, rendering it pretty musc useless to anyone that wanted to price comparison shopping. Considering this was the site purpose, the introduction of this new feature was not a wise choice.

The problem was Froogle's decision to list eBay auctions. Thousands of "eBay merchants" have embraced the policy of listing an item with a $25.00 retail value for a price of $.01 (one cent). This would be a good deal, except the shipping and handeling is $28.00! It's just a scam to beat the search engines.

This means that any attempt to search for something by price on Froogle results in 50 hits on eBay. Here are results if you search by price:
    usb bluetooth adapter
    First 199 hits are eBay, most under $1.00
Here's how to prevent this from happening:
    usb bluetooth adapter -ebay
    First hit is uBid for $6.00

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