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"Froogle" is Google's shopping search engine and is a play on
the word "frugal", meaning to be thrifty or economical in the handling of
money. At Google's
Froogle homepage,
their definition of "frugal" is given as "Smart shopping through Google".
The content that is returned using a Froogle search differs
from that which you get by using Google's other search engines such as
Google Search and
Google Images. That difference lies in how Google collects the
information to return to you when you use these various search options.
In the case of Google Search and Google Images, the data is collected and
indexed by Google using a process that is initiated by Google called
"spidering", a term that comes from the internet commonly being referred to
as the "web". Spidering refers to the process whereby Google sends out
its "spider", essentially an automated link-clicker called "GoogleBot" that
"crawls" the internet by following link, after link, after link and indexing
what it finds along the way. Once again, this process is initiated by
Google, and it is the wish and desire of every webmaster that GoogleBot will
come and spider his or her website early and often. When it comes to
the data that is returned for a Froogle search, however, this is supplied by
the webmaster himself to Google. So everything that you get to see by
using Froogle has been delivered to Google by a webmaster. ArikiArt
takes part in this process, providing Google with its art catalog on a
regular basis.
The rest of this newsletter is intended as a tutorial on
how to use the functionality of Froogle to search the ArikiArt catalog.
I will show you how to use not only key word searches, but also how to sort
the artworks by price, within price ranges, and by artist.
If you have spent some time surfing Ariki Art, you may
have noticed by now that one of the links at the top of every page is a link
to
Ariki Art's art catalog at Froogle. Clicking on that link will
take you to the Ariki Art "store" at Froogle, and will look something like
what you see below. I get 50 items returned per page. The
default setting for any web search is typically 10 results, but if you
connect to the internet using broadband, you might like to increase the
default. Do this by clicking on the "Preferences" link at the top
right that I have highlighted in yellow.
You will notice in the search box that this is filled with
store:arikiart. This tells Froogle to return only the items in its
index that relate to Ariki Art. Leave that there while you search the
Ariki Art catalog.
At the top of the left column, you will see I have
highlighted the type of view. The illustration above shows how it
looks when set to "List View". With list you get an image and a
description of each item, plus a link to the page at ArikiArt.com for that
item. If you click on "Grid View" you will get the items in a table
with the image, some brief information, and a hyperlink to the items page at
ArikiArt; you are not getting the longer description.
Below is how it will look in Froogle's "Grid View":
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