November 2005 archive - Search Industry News

Submit your local store inventory to Froogle

8:31 pm - November 30, 2005 in Official Google Base Blog

By Samantha C. in Froogle Product Marketing:

Until recently, Froogle could only direct traffic to sellers' online stores - but not anymore. Using Google Base (and just in time for intensive holiday shopping), sellers with local stores can now use Froogle to get foot traffic, too. If you post both online and local inventory information, you let shoppers decide whether they want to buy via your website or by picking up the item from your store. This is especially useful for products that people like to try and see before they buy (clothing, electronics) as well as for items that are heavy or hard to ship (furniture, cars).

To have your local store information displayed in Froogle, use Google Base to provide us with information about the inventory in your local stores. For the details, go here.

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Have a lot of stuff?

8:30 pm - November 30, 2005 in Official Google Base Blog

By Steven D. in Google Base Operations:

If you've got a lot of data to submit to Google Base, here are some tips on bulk uploading–it's the most efficient way to get a large amount of data into the program. (If you're all about posting single items, there's more here.)

Right now, we accept bulk uploads in tab-delimited and XML file formats. If you submit an XML file you can format your data using RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, or Atom 0.3. When submitting your data in any of these formats, it's important to use attributes to help you provide as much meaningful information about your items as possible.

To make using attributes as easy as possible, we provide a pre-defined set of attributes that can be used to give us basic information about your items. For example, a bulk upload of a list of restaurant reviews can contain pre-defined attributes such as author, name_of_item_reviewed, and rating. These attributes will help people find your content easily through specialized searches. For more details on pre-defined attributes, check out the info on tab-delimited or XML.

If our pre-defined attributes aren't enough, you can create and submit your own custom set. These can include whatever additional details you choose. Just create a custom attribute and add the pertinent information when you upload. There's no limit to the number of custom attributes you can use; all we ask is that your format these custom attributes correctly (using our specifications for tab-delimited or XML.

A couple of final notes: We do plan to support Atom 1.0 in the nearfuture, and are working on an expanded list of pre-defined attributesto make it easier to include all your data without going custom. Fornow, we strongly encourage you to provide as many pre-defined andcustomized attributes in your bulk uploads as you think you need.

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Trouble with verification

8:11 pm - November 30, 2005 in Inside Google Sitemaps

Some of you have had one of the following responses when trying to verify:

"Our system has experienced a temporary problem."

or,

" The system is currently busy. Please try again in a few minutes."

However, when you do try again later, you continue to get one of these messages. This is a known issue and we are working to resolve it as quickly as possible. Thanks for your patience.

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Trick of the Day: Plug-in Fine-Tuning

12:38 pm - November 30, 2005 in Inside Google Desktop

Posted by Mihai Ionescu, Software Engineer

For our developers here's a neat trick to help you easily develop, test and fine-tune a Sidebar script plug-in without the need to repeatedly install the plug-in after each modification.

1. Create the installer for your plug-in and install it once. The plug-in is installed in the Program Files directory under Google Desktop Search\Plugins\YourPluginName. Once installed you can modify the plug-in script sources directly.

2. To test changes after modifying the script sources use the "Add/Remove Panels" menu option to unload the old plug-in and load in the new version.

3. Once you are satisfied with the results transfer the modified files back to your original code base and use the plug-in installer to create the final plug-in package.

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extend your firefox 581%

8:56 pm - November 29, 2005 in del.icio.us

After much effort, we've finally released our official Firefox extension which supports Firefox 1.0.7+ and up.

Highlights include:

del.icio.us buttons. Easily access your bookmarks and post new bookmarks.
Position these buttons anywhere you'd like.
Popup post window. Post a bookmark without leaving the page you are on.
The popup disappears after you hit "save".
Right-click post. Bring up the post popup from any mouse position.
Right-click on a link to post that link.
Highlight notes. Add notes to your post by highlighting text and then posting.
Notes can help you remember an item.
del.icio.us menu. Quick access to del.icio.us with keyboard shortcuts.
Menu can be hidden if desired.
del.icio.us search. Quickly search for your bookmarks or others.
Discover new sites.

Exposing Content Bidding via the API in January

7:16 pm - November 29, 2005 in AdWords API Blog

As some of you have heard, we released a new feature in AdWords last week that enables advertisers to place content-only bids for ads that will run on the Google content network. You can read more about content bids on the Inside AdWords Blog or on the AdWords Help Center.

We had planned to expose this function via the API this week. However, based on developer feedback, we've decided to delay the release until mid January (so as not to introduce large changes in the middle of the busy holiday shopping season).

In early January we will update you on the timing of this release and provide an advance copy of the WSDL at least one week before the launch.

--Patrick Chanezon, AdWords API evangelist

More from AdWords API Team in Google News

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Come Visit the MSN Search Team

4:54 pm - November 29, 2005 in MSN Search's WebLog

A little over a year ago we began inviting groups of academics, bloggers, siteowners, and technologists out to Redmond to talk about search. We call them Search Champs. We usually select this group based on who we are reading and we think would provide us great insight. We spend a couple of days with the group showing them our future plans, getting their input and making connections. Every time we hold these sessions we inevitably hear from people who want to be included, but we had never heard of them or didn’t know that they would be interested in MSN Search. It’s always with regret that we have to turn people away.

We don’t want to make this mistake again and this time we are going to do an Open Call for anyone to apply to be a Search Champ. We want to hear from you! If you want to shape the future of our product then please fill out this application. The event will take place in Redmond (on the MS campus) from 1/24-1/26 and expenses will be paid by us. Champs will be selected based on who applies and what products we are reviewing. Hope to meet you!

Brady Forrest
MSN Search Team

Google Appoints Ann Mather to its Board of Directors*

3:36 am - November 29, 2005 in Google Press Releases

AdWords API Terms and Conditions: Thank You for the feedback

8:34 pm - November 28, 2005 in AdWords API Blog

Thank you all for your feedback on the recent changes to the AdWords API Beta terms and conditions. We have been collecting your comments over the last few days, and we plan to review them alongside our policies over the next few weeks.

The new terms and conditions seem to cause some concern for developers of open source and commercial third party tools, and we want to address these concerns.

We will have more specifics for you in the coming weeks once we have had a chance to thoroughly discuss your feedback.

--Patrick Chanezon, AdWords API evangelist

More from AdWords API Team in Google News

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Subscribing to feeds via little Google buttons

1:20 pm - November 28, 2005 in The Official Google Reader Blog

The web is full of little buttons these days. Little buttons pop up everywhere to email an article, watch a video, play a song, post to your blog, or bookmark a site. They can claim affiliation to various ideas, communities, or ideologies. Browsing the web these days with an eye towards looking at these tiny, active buttons is almost zoological in nature.

See!→

In recent days we added a little button to the button zoo. Google is now offering a little "Add to Google" button which you can put on your site, blog, or corner of the web that can make it easy for people to subscribe to your feed. Here's some instructions for adding the button to your site.

If you'd prefer more direct links from your browser (and if you are a bit brave) you can try dragging any of the following bookmarklets to your links toolbar. Now here's something funny: some feedreaders strip out potentially malicious scripting as can exist in bookmarklets. Google Reader is one, so if you're reading this post from there, you'll have to visit our blog to get 'em. After adding them, you can click them to preview the site you're visiting in Reader and easily subscribe to it. We can't issue a warranty on this approach 'cause we might change something since Reader isn't yet 2 months old. (A toddler!)

→ Subscribe - Views the first available feed in Google Reader.
→ Show all feeds - Lists all feeds and links them to Google Reader. Sadly this link won't work in IE6 with SP2 due to recent changes Microsoft has been making to provide a more secure browser. If you're using Internet Explorer then we recommend skipping this one.

We have our eye on further solutions for one-click subscriptions and like many others we're looking into ways we can help but for now we hope a little button makes for happier subscribing and reading.

More from Chris Wetherell in Google News