I just gave Froogle Google Product Search a try, and was surprised to find that it’s been overrun by scammers. It doesn’t have a seller verification system, so it’s only useful as a quick search for scam sellers. Plug in any popular consumer electronics product and sort by price, and Google will helpfully display a number of obvious scams.

A quick search for the Sony KDL-52XBR4 (their latest 52″ HDTV) turned up a few gems. They’re obvious: the whois records are days old, and after any attempt to order with a credit card they make an excuse and request a money order. Some of the frauds are even well documented.

What’s surprising about these shops, though, is that they’re fairly comprehensive. The perpetrators can’t come up with a believable brand (”Shopping Shop: Welcome to Our’s Shop”), but online store software has become advanced enough that it’s a fairly small endeavor to make an entire fake electronics shop. Choose your software, pick a template, throw in some stolen graphics, and then input the products– in the ideal case, you can automatically parse this information from another site and upload it to your store. It’s non-trivial, but a couple fake $1500 TVs will pay for the work in no time.

Google’s developing a reputation for shotgunning beta products, and shutting down Froogle is a good first step towards fighting that image. The quirks of some beta products are merely annoying: GMail remains quite usable, despite its infinite beta status. On the other hand, Froogle is helping to facilitate massive fraud. Shut it down until it’s ready for prime time.

UPDATE: I did a bit of digging around on other price comparison sites.  Most have a lot fewer money-order scammers, but are instead full of 5-star-rated fraudsters who will ship a foreign gray market product without telling you, send you products you didn’t order and charge you for them (then attempt to charge a restocking fee when you return them), and claim your product is out of stock if you refuse to buy their overpriced extras.  MySimon and PriceGrabber list the scammers alongside reputable merchants; EveryPrice.com specializes in listing only scammers.  It’s hard to tell if they intentionally manipulate their own rating systems to keep ratings for the rip-off artists inflated, or if employees from the “companies” manipulate them.

After my spectacular computer meltdowns (my new mobo still can’t recognize any hard drives for more than a couple minutes), I’m wary of self-assembly.  I want something with a warranty.

However, I don’t like most of the parts the mainstream desktop sellers use: crappy cases; low-end video cards; cheap RAM; loud fans.  The sellers that do use good parts tend to have extremely high markups.   I also don’t need the things they want to sell me: hard drive; monitor; keyboard; video card; operating system.

I used to go to Monarch Computer for this sort of thing.  They let you buy a box with just what you wanted inside– no parts forced, not even the CPU.  They’re gone.  Newegg doesn’t have systems.  Dell’s site breaks frequently under Firefox, and I doubt their systems would be suitable, if I could get them to work.  Is there a site that has what I’m looking for?  Or should I just try my luck with another mobo+CPU combo, and hope it doesn’t all end in tears once again?  The problem’s gotta be there, right?  …  Right?

I’m trying to find sites that use a particular CMS package. As part of my query, I’m looking for index.php and numbers in the URL (like so: index.php s=0..999).

Alas, Google provides me with this response:

We’re sorry…

… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

I finally got pretty good about updating, just to go silent for weeks. (Some friends may have noticed I’m not exactly responsive outside the blog, either.) I’m insanely busy right now, but hope to be back to intermittent posting within a few weeks. I’ve also got a direction for my game that I’m pretty excited about, I don’t expect to post anything public about it until next year.

This is another post totally unrelated to game or web development, but here’s a shot of my dad from our recent trip to Palau and Yap:

More great shots here.

Also,  thanks to Dagon Design for the tip on how to change thumbnail size in the latest versions (2.1 and later) of Wordpress.  My old fix wasn’t working after the upgrade.

I’m sure you’ll see this linked at dozens of other sources, but I can’t resist.

“Eyeball tattooing, to attain the electric blue eyes of the Arrakian spice melange addict.”

I’m back from Palau and Yap.

I’ve added topic subscription/new post notification, and upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress.  The new post tracking should be helpful for the topics you’re interested in.  I didn’t bother adding the ability to subscribe to a topic without posting to it, but it’s easy to add with the plugin I’m using.  I don’t like how it clutters the interface, though.  Let me know if you want that functionality.

I’m going to be away from almost all communication technologies for a bit.  When I get back, I expect someone to tell me what the heck is going on with the Halo 3 ARG.  I recommend getting in on it– if it’s anything like last time, the ARG is the best part of Halo.

The State Department’s passport status line just kept me on hold for four hours, and then hung up on me.

Passport renewal has devolved into serious chaos at this point.  If you are thinking of traveling overseas as soon as one year from now, and you’ll need a passport renewal, apply NOW.  If you need one in less than four months and haven’t applied yet, drop me a line– there are some things you need to know about applying.

I really did try to come up with a good caption, but I couldn’t– maybe this Sudoku speaks for itself.