Catching up … Google recently announced that it was changing the name of Froogle to Google Product Search. Apparently not enough people were getting the pun, or something. Meanwhile, Google Catalogs, which I rather liked when it was launched, continues to quietly molder away in a corner. Unfortunate!

Anyway, the reason I’m bringing this up is to offer a couple of tips to people who dislike searching Google Product Search as much as I do — or rather did, since I found a way to alleviate the pain. I used to find Google Product Search hard to use, either bringing me too many results or too little. I found that using just one syntax — intitle: — made finding things a lot easier.

Usually what I do is put the general idea of what I’m looking for in the intitle: and then any additional keywords in the rest of the query. So if I’m looking for a red denim jacket, I might try red denim intitle:jacket . Cuts down the search results a lot.

You might want to explore http://www.google.com/advanced_product_search , though I find that the searching by price area is really a crap shoot, especially since you’re also searching eBay auctions. Sometimes the prices are really wacky…