Archive for November, 2005

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.

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.

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 …

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 insta…

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

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 …

A little over a year ago we began inviting groups nbsp;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. nbsp; 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 ForrestMSN Search Team

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 …

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 t…