This interview marks the second of two we have conducted with the folks over at Channel Intelligence. For more insights into the company and their services be sure to check out the first interview we did with Vik Murty about SellPath.

As a core part of their solution, Channel Intelligence offers industry leading comparison shopping and data feed services for merchants and eCommerce sellers who are interested in receiving high-end channel marketing technology from a company with a long standing reputation in this industry. The individual comparison shopping services are designed to make the process of generating, uploading, optimizing and tracking feeds as simple and easy as possible on the publisher. Also, they are setup in a way that makes it absolutely clear which campaigns are producing what, giving additional insight into the campaigns that may need to be improved or tweaked in order to produce the desired results.

ChannelBrain is Freeportway’s (parent company) service for eCommerce merchants looking to market or sell within Online marketing channels such as comparison shopping engines (CSE’s) and shopping portals. ChannelBrain’s solution is designed to help and facilitate the process of syndicating various products offered by merchants and eTailers to numerous CSE’s all from one, simple to use location and tool. In addition to the formatting, ease of syndication and one-click solution, ChannelBrain also offers users the ability to create their campaigns so that progress, or lack of, can be tracked.

We have recently added a new section to our comparison shopping guide dedicated to the top data feed companies that currently offer comparison shopping engine listing services including feed generation, submission, distribution, management and tracking. Some merchants find it difficult to setup, manage and track their individual CSE campaigns and sometimes they just don’t have the time to deal with all that’s involved. For this reason, several companies now offer different services designed to help ease or take-over these tasks for any merchant who may fit into either category.

One such company featured on our data feeds list, DoubleClick Performics, was gracious enough to spend some time with me in order to discuss their comparison shopping solution details more in depth. I hope to eventually take the time to talk with each company on our list so that our readers can pick and choose based on the individual needs or goals of any CSE campaign.

It looks like the folks over at PriceGrabber have rolled out a fresh new look for the comparison shopping sites homepage. There were some initial reports from around the blogoshere that they have been testing it for about a month now, and it looks like they are pleased with it, as the new design appears to be here to stay (before it was only being displayed at certain times to certain visitors).

I recently noticed a change to the ‘Products’ link in Google’s main navigation. Not too long ago they removed the ‘Video’ link and replaced it with ‘Products’ instead. Now they have changed the ‘Products’ link again, but this time they renamed it to ‘Shopping’ on the main navigation found on all results pages and Google’s main page.

I was browsing news headlines yesterday and came across an interesting one on CNN Money about Google Product Search. According to the news piece, the comparison shopping engine site by Google has been experiencing dramatic drops in traffic to their shopping service while comparable shopping search services such as TheFind.com or Pronto.com and even Yahoo Shopping have all increased or remained steady, at the least.

Our regular blog readers know that I am quite fond of the comparison shopping engine known as TheFind.com. It’s one of the CSE’s I regularly post about and advocate for and continues to move up on my list as one of the best product search destinations with social shopping capabilities. Not too long ago, we posted about some of the things TheFind is doing to make their search service even better including their mini-malls, virtual shopping districts, improved product mouse hovers and even an advanced search and browsing history features.

Today, TheFind has launched yet another new and useful feature for shoppers and merchants which allows TheFind.com users to be able to search and discover local shopping destinations for products within a specific geographic area. Not only that, but the new local search sorting and refinement capability also includes an in-store availability feature and shows the user related maps, all from one page for quick and easy access to products close to a shoppers’ physical locations.

Google Base Blog announced today that they are changing the name of their ‘bulk uploads’ tab to be more in line with eCommerce publisher and merchant terminology. The tab will now be called ‘data feeds,’ which still appears under the My Items tab next to Active and Inactive Item links (see screenshot above).

I have been researching some duplicate content topics lately for a friend/colleague of mine and while trying to find some examples for him I accidentally came across some interesting issues that Google is having on their own domain/subdomain with content being duplicated. I understand that massive sites (like Google) with as many different domains/subdomains and services as they have might be tough to manage. I imagine that their duplicate pages could get overwhelming to manage for anyone really quickly. Since they don’t seem to be aware of the issues I happened across (maybe more), I decided to write this post to help them out with a couple of the things I found (if they listen, I will consider posting more about other services).

In addition to the duplicate content issues I found, I also wanted to bring to light the many Froogle pages that still remain in Google’s index, despite being replaced by Google Product Search back in April 2007. Right now, if you type froogle.com into your address bar or even froogle.google.com, you’ll be redirected to the new product service at www.google.com/products. This is common, especially when changing domains or file locations, and it is good practice to use these types of 301 redirects, as Google stated about a year ago on the Webmaster Central blog.

I was searching around on Google Product Search today and noticed something amazing, new features. Not only are there new features, but they are useful to both shoppers and merchants who upload to Google Base in order to get listed in Product Search.

My regular readers know that I have been giving a lot of attention to Google Product Search and Base the past two weeks as they continue to add new features and improve both of those services. They have even been updating Google Checkout policies lately. Hmmm, makes one wonder what’s in store, looks like they are getting ready to do something BIG with all of the attention that these core Google commerce services have been getting recently.

So, what are the new Google Product Search Features? Check them out below, you won’t be sorry…