Meet your personal shopper: Google

With holiday spending in full gear, Google is testing a new service that uses the company's search engine to help shoppers find products online.

Dubbed Froogle, the new service lets people search by category or by simply typing a product type into the search window. The search results are provided using Google's spider technology, which scours merchant websites for relevant product data.

The service for now is a bare-bones affair. Unlike the pages on some portal sites, there's no central shopping cart or wallet, and the company has no special merchant stores. It does allow people to narrow their search by price.

On its web page the company said:"Froogle [provides] a lightning quick way to search the largest collection of stores and products on the web. That means if the item you're looking to buy is online, Froogle will likely find it."

Google representatives could not immediately be reached for comment.

Margaret Kane writes for News.com