Froogle is an
online store search engine from
Google. It is still in
Beta, but it is already great. You can type in a few
keywords (for example, "CD Burner") and hit
search, and you will see, in a nice
tidy format complete with
thumbnail pictures, short
descriptions, and
prices, a list of things that Froogle thinks are
CD burners. You may have some false results, such as
burners for
stoves or
CD-ROM drives, but in general things will go smoothly. You can search in
categories and specify a range of prices to narrow down your results. I think the only problem is that there isn't a unified payment system for all the stores that Froogle searches, although PayPal could simplify things quite a bit.
This could help smaller independent stores succeed in an online market dominated by giants like Amazon.com, which I view as a good thing, since it promotes competition.
If you want to try it out, the address is:
http://www.froogle.com/