Wise Web merchants will start paying attention to the reviews their products are getting online, since more consumers will have ready access to those reviews -- thanks to recent additions to Google's online shopping engine, Froogle.

The new feature, Froogle Product Reviews, aggregates product ratings culled from the media and product-rating Web sites.

Froogle, of course, pieces its product database together by crawling the Web and integrating feeds from merchants. Search results typically show photos, prices, and the online merchant carrying the product.

Now, when Web users search for "digital camera" on Froogle, a ratings score appears beside each result, aggregating the product's ratings on Web sites on a five-point scale (similarly to how Metacritic.com gathers movie reviews and generates an aggregated score). Froogle also posts the number of reviews for the product.

Users can click on the rating or number of reviews to see a listing of relevant reviews -- and moreover, can then search within the reviews for specific phrases like "battery life," "photo quality," or "customer support."

Shoppers can also sort the reviews by review source, relevance (Google's search algorithms determine from the search term) or by date.

At present, Froogle Product Reviews exists only in a public beta version (which is Google's standard practice for introducing new features) and is available only on consumer electronics.

The effort is designed to help Web shoppers make better-informed purchasing decisions. But it also means that shoppers will have easier access than ever to product reviews -- so that if you're carrying a real lemon, visitors are now more likely to know about it.

The move comes on the heels of a similar Froogle enhancement that aggregates and posts user reviews about online merchants themselves. In advance of the holiday shopping season, Froogle debuted Store Ratings, enabling users to see how other shoppers have rated their experience with a particular online store.

Like Product Reviews, Store Ratings are culled from end-user ratings sites like BizRate.com, Shopping.com and ResellerRatings.com.

Consequently, it behooves merchants to polish their reputations on those ratings sites -- ideally, by giving good customer service, which will then be reflected on those sites.

In addition to Product Reviews and Store ratings, Froogle also recently introduced a customizable shopping list, which can be shared with friends as a Wish List.

Christopher Saunders is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.

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