Google strikes again. Have you seen this? It appears that the mighty search engine Google is branching out into yet another searchable class of items -- namely, anything you might ever want to buy. You have to admire their chutzpah.

People have tried to make intelligent price-finding agents before, that automatically go out and find the cheapest price for something. They're usually met by resistance from the site owners who don't want their prices instantly compared to everybody else's. Google might have the clout to make it work this time.

There can be broad economic repercussions from this type of tool. Like, what chance does a store have if it's not selling something at the cheapest price to be found anywhere on the internet? Follow that to its logical end and someday every product might have a fixed price.

Hmmm, I looked again, and it doesn't actually do price comparisons. Maybe someday. Right now it's all about just finding the product you're looking for, which is still cool enough.

They need to branch this tool out a bit though, like the ability to filter for products that can actually be delivered to a given country. All the sites indexed by Froogle that I used to shop at won't deliver to Singapore. Sniff.