Just as the holiday shopping season gets underway, Google Inc. will make it even easier for shoppers to part with their hard-earned cash.

On Tuesday, Google is set to unveil a new internet tool designed to facilitate consumer shopping at a buyer's local mall. The feature will be part of the Froogle shopping site that was launched three years ago and is designed to pinpoint local merchants offering a specific item in a particular ZIP code. In addition to providing a map of all the area stores that carry the specified merchandise, Froogle will reportedly list price differences for those varied locations. However, the site will still provide visitors the option to buy their desired products online as well so as to avoid the shopping mall trip all together.

The move by Google corresponds to recent competitor upgrades including Yahoo Inc.'s recent 50% increase in product offerings, moving from 60 million a year ago to 90 million today. Though Google has been at the top of the search engine field for years, the Froogle comparison shopping site currently ranks a distant fifth in visitor hits, having received about 6.4 million visits in the month of September (Nielsen/NetRatings Inc.).

In contrast, the top two comparison sites, Shopzilla and Shopping.com, attracted approximately 15 million unique visitors during the same time period. The two top internet shopping sites currently advertise heavily on Google and Yahoo, relying on the two search enginegiants to send shoppers over to their lesser-known comparison sites.