Valley Chai

for some reason i thought the universal header on google sites shows the links to only the products that you normally use. i noticed today the “products” link showed up, clearly to coincide with the holiday season. i have stopped using froogle long time ago, so i was surprised at the uncharacteristic intrusion from google.

it’s not called froogle anymore, and is now called “product search”. everything else pretty much remains the same, except that the grid view and the guided navigation are de-emphasized.

• notice how first two results are identical? the only differences are the font (all caps ranked higher) and merchant rating (lower merchant rating ranked lower). pure algorithmic relevance should’ve ranked the DVD from buy.com at #1 position, but the regular web search best-practices haven’t made their way into product search. all-caps is a big no-no, and is equivalent to yelling in cyber culture.
• sad to see Yahoo advertising on Google sponsored search results - you wouldn’t pass revenue to your competitior but this probably was out of compulsion, given that they botched up the cyber monday so badly.
• it appears like their checkout is being plastered everywhere. clearly this property is less a vehicle for product search and more a vehicle for popularizing their checkout
• and finally, the checkout icons are too heavy and splattered around on the page like big smudges on the page. very ugly.