Google

any part of the product description.
The box below that is the Exact
Phrase section. Use this if you want
your results to include only products
that have the exact phrase you’re
searching for in their product descriptions.
The next option you have is to
perform a search that includes all
products that have at least one of the
words you’re searching for in their
descriptions. You can use the final
box to narrow your results by entering
words that you don’t want to
see in your search. For instance, if
you’re looking for a PCI Express
video card and don’t want to waste
your time sifting through comparably
priced AGP (Accelerated Graphics
Port) video cards, you may want to
enter PCI Express in the exact phrase
box and then enter AGP in the
Without These Words field.
Just to the right of the All Words
search box you’ll notice a couple
more search options in the form of
drop-down menus. The first adjustment
you can make is the number of
results you want to view per page.
Froogle will show as few as 10 or as
many as 100 results per page.
To the right of the results menu,
you have another drop-down menu
that lets you choose how you want to
view your results. You can sort by the
best match to your search query, from
the lowest price to the highest price,
or vice versa.
In theory, the next adjustment you
can control is the price range you’re
looking for. However, we couldn’t get
this feature to work on our test
T HE S EARCH
The Advanced Froogle Search
offers a number of options
that let you manipulate
variables. You can, for
example, control the number
of results shown on each page
and the format in which
Froogle displays your results.
searches. We’d input values
for the lowest and highest
prices, but when we clicked
Search Froogle, our search wouldn’t
yield any results. While this feature
will no doubt be helpful when it is
working properly, don’t put too
much stock in it right now.
The next thing you can adjust is
the Occurrences feature. This dropdown
menu lets you choose which
products to include in your results
based on where your search query
appears in the product description.
You can choose to view results that
have your query only in the title of
the product, only in the description
of the product, or in either the title
or the description of the product
you’re looking for.
Another useful tool right below
the Occurrences drop-down menu is
the Category drop-down. Froogle
groups the online businesses it
searches into various categories. You
can use this menu to choose which
group of enterprises you want to
search based on the type of product
you’re looking for. Say you want a
new mouse for your computer, and
not some food for your pet boa constrictor.
You can select the
Computers category from
the list, and you will now
search only the computer
and computer parts sellers
for the term “mouse,” and
not every seller in Froogle.
The List View gives you
tons of information and
reviews on the product
you’re seeking and the
online stores that sell it.
Finally, there is a group of three
options that each have a pair of
radio buttons you can use to customize
the display of your results
page. The first option lets you
choose whether you want your results
grouped by stores or if you
want to show all the products. When
we had the setting on Group By
Store, a search for “optical mouse”
returned 58,500 matches from 32
different stores. We switched the setting
to Show All Products and ran
the same search. This yielded 59,700
results, though it was only from 18
stores. As you can see, this didn’t appear
to drastically change our search
results, but it is one more thing you
can play around with when you’re
searching for the perfect widget.
The next setting is View. Use it to
choose whether you want to look at a
page in List View, which will give you
the most information, or as a grid,
which will shorten the page by giving
the bare-bones information, such as
price and the number of locations, and
omit the less relevant information,
such as product descriptions. (You can
still see the product description in Grid
View; just click the product you want
to learn more about.)
As you can see, there is a lot to
soak up in the List View. If you
don’t necessarily need all the information
that displays in List View or
if your scrolling finger is a bit out of
shape, you might find the Grid View
a little easier to manage. The Froogle
search remains the same; changing
views in no way affects the number
Reference Series / Guide To Using Google 43