I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [177]
By Any Other Name
Google news wasn't the only new product in the hopper. We had a product-search service scheduled to launch before the end of 2002 as well. The product team had assigned it the code name "Froogle."
"I was hoping you could help us out with a tagline for Froogle for the launch," Pearl Renaker, the PM for the new product, said to me in late August 2002.
"I'd love to," I told her, but thought to myself, "Uh-oh." It occurred to me that I had not been in any discussions about the "real" name that would replace "Froogle" when it went live. I suddenly got the feeling that the code name was no longer just a code name. Pearl confirmed it.
"We'd like to brand it as Froogle, but position it as a brand extension of Google." It was still a couple of months until launch. I had time to explain all the reasons that was a really bad idea.
My objections to naming our new feature "Froogle" were grounded in the brand architecture I had worked out with Salar, but more important, in Google's tradition of "underpromise and overdeliver." Salar and I had agreed when we launched the Google directory in 2000 that new products would all be under the Google name and just have descriptive titles: Google directory, Google image search, Google news. Froogle would be the first product to break that mold and set up an independent brand. Essentially, it would be saying that Google was no longer the one place to go for all searches. Users would have to choose one brand or the other. And it would set a dangerous precedent for future brand proliferation. Would we now create a name for every new service we developed?
I did see advantages to establishing an independent brand as a platform for commerce-related services. If Froogle was being positioned as a competitor to Amazon, with shopping carts and buyer reviews and one-click technology, it might make sense to give it its own Google-derived identity. But Froogle wasn't up to that challenge.
The Froogle prototype I had been trying out found products for sale on the web and ranked them according to "relevance," which didn't mean much when you had thirty identical waffle irons all offered at the same price. We did have "objectivity." Our partner Yahoo charged most merchants to be included in their product search, and Yahoo's search results sent users to Yahoo stores instead of directly to the merchants' sites. Yahoo had an editorial team making decisions, while we used a completely automated, and thus "purer," system, unaffected by paid relationships with merchants.
That was pretty much it.
There was no way to buy anything on Froogle without leaving the site. There were no product reviews. There were no merchant ratings. You couldn't sort by store, by brand, or by price. There was no way to do anything other than click on a link and go somewhere else. It was a search for finding products—a product search. That, I thought, is what we should call it: "Google product search." Calling it "Froogle" gave the impression that it was a comprehensive, full-fledged service, not a feature. People would bring to their first experience with Froogle all the expectations we had trained them to have for new Google services. They would expect "the Google of commerce." Instead, they would get—product search.
I went to Salar and the UI team to be sure they were aligned with my thinking. They were. Salar didn't like the name because the "frugal/Froogle" pun wouldn't translate internationally. Some English speakers might not get it either. Now I had to convince the people who could stop the runaway train before it got to the end of the line. I would argue my case at the Froogle GPS.
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