Shopping the Google way

By PETER GRIFFIN IT writer

It's one of the plainest looking websites resident on the internet, but these days search engine www.google.com is first stop for millions of web users. Why?

Well, as the Rolling Stones have sung a thousand times, "you can't always get what you want", but Google will put you on the right track, if not land you uncomfortably close to what you've been sniffing out.

Suddenly famous for the accuracy of its web searches, Google is sending its electronic "spiders" on new missions. First it was to find articles to fill Google's recently launched news portal news.google.com. Now it's to find goods, gadgets and gifts for internet shoppers.

New Zealand expatriate Dr Craig Nevill-Manning is one of the computer experts behind the development of Google's goods-finder - the craftily named Froogle.

Google, says the Waikato University computer sciences graduate, is great at retrieving information from the mass of pages making up the web.

"But it doesn't do such a good job of finding places where products are sold."

That is where Froogle comes in - the search engine solely focused on finding goods advertised on the web.

Want a digital camera? Just punch the two words into Froogle and camera descriptions and pricing, along with pictures, will be served up - sourced from retailers such as WalMart through to specialist camera retailers.

You can search by key word or category, or by narrowing down the price range.

Just as with Google, the search usually takes a fraction of a second. The simple request flashes through Google's indexing servers and then out to the web, returning results pulled from billions of web pages.

It's clever stuff, technology that probably would have taken Google to a Nasdaq listing if it had achieved its current level of popularity at the height of the dotcom boom.

It was while studying at Stanford in the late nineties that Nevill-Manning met Larry Page and Russian-born Sergey Brin, the duo behind Google's searching technology and algorithms. The pair were developing "Backrub", the technology that would become Google, which they formed in 1998.

With an intensive background in computer science, Nevill-Manning knew what the two had developed was revolutionary.

"You could tell just by doing searches on Google how clever it was. I sometimes feel like Google is reading my mind!"

Closely involved with Froogle's development, Nevill-Manning says the breadth of Google's searches is the key to its finely honed results.

"We want to be all-inclusive, so we don't charge anything, we crawl everyone we can," he said.

Merchants cannot pay to jump up Froogle's results rankings. Google makes money by licensing its searching technology and through selling adverts and sponsored links on search results pages.

A result of this, says Nevill-Manning, is that Froogle will give exposure to smaller merchants who traditionally have missed out on the web.

"Before Froogle I might have gone to Amazon.com because I'm familiar with it and they've a reasonable range of products," he explains.

"I know I can get results from the big merchants but I know if I'm sensitive to price or am looking for an unusual item I can get results relating to that."

But with so much clutter on the web - defunct sites and stale web pages - Froogle is bound to turn up some misinformation.

"We're not going into every offer and checking that it's still valid," says Nevill-Manning.

"Where we get complaints we'll look into them."

Launched quietly in December and still in "beta" mode, Froogle is developing gradually, building off feedback from web surfers.

The potential is huge, especially down the track when Froogle moves beyond North America to list e-tailers in other countries and sites written in other languages and featuring different currencies.

With the e-tailing survivors of the dotcom crash finally starting to climb out of the red, e-commerce is experiencing a new wave of enthusiasm that Google and competitors like Ask.com, Dealtime.com and Bizrate among them can capitalise on.

Its on-the-nail search results have already led Google to begin working for the large web portal operators Yahoo! and AOL. Rather than try to compete with their own searching technology, the two US giants now use Google's techniques attempting in the process to drive traffic to revenue-generating parts of their sites.

"Yahoo! layer over some of their more specialised content, but the search results, fundamentally, come from Google," says Nevill-Manning.

With Google-converts around the world keying in everything from family tree queries to vanity searches, where does the future lie for search engine technology? Nevill-Manning says keeping the searching process as simple as possible will still be top priority in future.

"Making them very low-bandwidth so people can get results quickly and making those 10 first page results more relevant."

While search engine companies have devised more graphic-based search engines with icons or pictures guiding the searcher, Google's plain white background and blue text minimalism underpins its approach.

Google developers are however keen to try new things - voice-activated searching among them. Google experiments in this area receive an airing with the public at labs.google.com.

With several years of post-graduate work behind him in the US, Nevill-Manning is comfortable living in the heart of Silicon Valley, where Google holds its headquarters in the city of Mountain View.

Google's working environment, says Nevill-Manning, maintains the casual air dotcoms are known for but, dotted with former university professors and highly qualified degree graduates, has a healthy dose of intellectual energy.

Lava lamps in the Google primary colours sit on developers' desks, workers tap away on laptops perched on beanbags. A reception display scrolls some of the recent entries into the search engine.

He finds time in the evening for sampling the best of Californian vino with the Google wine club and on the day the Weekend Herald rang, was gearing up for a special screening of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers for Google staff.