I just ran across this Google sub-service called Froogle (I thought that was kind of clever ).

Anyway, it already found me a price that didn't show up on any other price search sites. I found the Sony Ericsson P800 for $499 with activation. Pricegrabber, MySimon, and all the others showed nothing like this, and not even half of the total results.

Try it out. I'll be using it instead of Pricegrabber from now on.

more info

ps-I bought the phone as a direct result of the price find

Wow, that's cool.

Also neat is Google Catalogs, where they scan in mail-order catalogs and make them searchable. Very cool technology. It's hard to describe, so pick something and search for it. You'll see.

Wow... That IS very cool. Catalogs has made it to my shortcut bar.

That's definitely cool, but I never shop from catalogs. If I did, though, that would be great!

Froogle is great. Did anyone find a way to sort results by price ?

Yeah, I was looking for that as well. I was fine with just setting certain price ranges, though. For instance, I new there would be no place that would sell the P800 for less than $400, so I chose $400 to $600 then $400 to $500. It's not as good as a sort order, but I guess that's why it's a beta version

That's definitely cool, but I never shop from catalogs. If I did, though, that would be great!

On less computer-y and less otherwise mainstream stuff, products can be hard to find on the internet. You'd be surprised. Catalogs are still great for this. Also, there are any number of web sites that claim that they don't keep their whole catalog online, and as backwards as it may seem, their print catalog is more complete.

Wow... that's pretty neat. Amazon does something like this, or must have licensed the tech, as I saw something like this on a search there.. I wonder how it works? OCR? Or lots and lots of slave labor?

It's OCR, I'm sure. I don't know if you noticed that it highlighted the word you fed into it. So if it is slave labor, they're also marking exactly where each word occurs.

So if it is slave labor, they're also marking exactly where each word occurs.

Well, with the tech job market as shaky as it is these days, I wouldn't be shocked if there was a warehouse full of B.S. C.S. grads meticulously typing in the X,Y coordinates of each word...

A year of that and they'd be ready to move out to Montana and get a shack.

And the OCR is so good that it grabbed mix off a can of cocoa mix even though the description only said cocoa. I am very impressed. It also has no problems with words on an angle. (very bottom of page)

Keep in mind Froogle is still in its infant stages - and is VERY flaky and often wrong on prices. We sell contemporary furniture through our website and have found that froogle has created listings for us that are all wrong.

If you don't pay for the service as a retailer, then it uses what its spiders/bots find, etc.. However, you can also pay (like with Ad-Words) and feed correct data to froogle via XML datafeeds, and the like, and get it to display things correctly. I'm not sure how froogle will ever be able to come out of beta with the high probability of error when data isn't feeded directly to it from the retailers.

- trs

- But the catalog thing - THAT is cool!

That's interesting. I'll have to keep that in mind. I've only done about 4 searches so far, but it yielded better results than any of the others, and by $100! That's enough to get me to use it. But I'll keep your words in mind and be more wary.