Google Base -- enormous potential, now's the time to experiment for free

Google Base — enormous potential, now’s the time to experiment for free

by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com, http://www.samizdat.com

Google is adding new features and services faster than I can keep up with them.

Their home page is crisp and clean and search oriented, as it always has been and always should be. (Unlike AltaVista, they didn’t get suckered into trying to turn their site into a general-purpose “portal”). But if you click on the link for “More” you’ll see more. And if you then click on “Even More”, you’ll see a lot more. But still you won’t see everything they have to offer, or even the most interesting of all (to a writer/publisher like me).

Do a Google search for “Google base” or go directly to http://base.google.com/

There you will find a massive experiment. Google is basically offering to not just index you content, but to host it — even product and service offerings — for free. And through a related service, Google Checkout, they’ll make it easy for customers to buy from you online. And you can link from your content/product listings to your main site or store site, all for free, and (one would hope and expect) with good ranking in the Google search engine.

I’m just beginning to explore the posibilities for my own business — first with my products (book collections on CD and DVD) and then I’ll try articles and book chapters of mine.

Despite it’s potential, this service is not yet ready for prime time (which is probably why they aren’t waving flags to attract more users). I guess you’d say the project is in “beta” mode — it works and works well, but it’s not “user-friendly” yet for the publisher.

Let’s look at the product side, since that’s all I’ve experimented with so far. You can list individual items by typing them in, following a very restrictive form. But having done so (which can take a long time), the listing is only good for 30 days. so you’ll need to come back to relist it, which isn’t too bad if they have saved what you entered, but several times my listings were “lost”. And I went through a couple weeks of battling automated “disapprovals”. Some of my CDs contain books the titles of which happen to have words that Google’s automated sniffers deemed inappropriate (like the G.A. Henty historical novel about the fight for independence in the Netherlands “By Pike and Dyke” or the 17th Century play “Tis a Pity She’s a Whore”). The automated sniffer also concluded that I was selling copyrighted material, which is not the case — these books are public domain. It took lots of email exchanges with the Google Base service people (who were very helpful, though probably overwhelmed by questions, because so much about this service is very scantily described on the Web site) to finally get a half dozen items listed. And being listed in Google Base meant they were immediately findable through Froogle, Google’s shopping search engine.

As an alternative, if you have lots of products, you can use their “bulk upload” option. At first, that was totally out of my league. They required that you submit information in formats I had never heard of and couldn’t possibly produce. Then they added the possibility of creating a file in Excel and saving it as “tab delimited text”. Well, I’m not a fan of Excel, but I do have the software; so I gave it a try. At the very least that would mean that my listings would be lost — I’d always have the info on my system for resubmission. Also, I soon discovered, when you bulk upload you can link to have visitors directed straight to the relevant store page instead of to a listing page at Google Base from which they could go to your store page. The less steps a customer has to go through the better. And bulk upload also made it easy to include an image with each listing.

On the negative side, Google Base is designed as a database, which you populate with structured information, unlike the typical AltaVista-style search engine which creates an index out of unstructured information, and makes it possible to find the needle in the haystack without disturbing the haystack. The database approach involves organizing every piece of hay and every piece of any other kind of thing in the stack, and then allowing searches. But this is free. And it is a potentially massive effort. (Once this goes totally live [out of beta] it could quickly grow to be far larger than the entire Internet was back when AltaVista was designed). So I should quibble over what is probably an irrelevant philosophical issue.

The database approach does, however, put a lot of work in the hands of the publisher submitting information, especially since folks like me (without exceptional technical knowledge) have to use Excel, which is laden with quirks.

So what do I have to complain about? Little things that can be very annoying. I submit a bulk upload. In it I have made a mistake — either I misunderstood the scany directions (that the column with “expiration date” has to be in the format 2006-10-12) or maybe I just made a foolish blunder. Within an hour of when up do the bulk upload, the upload page lets me know there is a mistake and gives me clues as to what is wrong. I immediately fix the mistake and upload again, only to be informed that I can only upload once an hour; so I have to wait before submitting the correction, then wait again for confirm that I did it right that time. And sometimes the automated checking passes my upload and I get an email a couple days later from a human being telling me that there was another kind of mistake. Fortunately, the people who send those emails are very helpful and clear. So wading through quick sand I make progress (at the cost of lots of time).

And at first many of those “mistakes” were automatically generated by Excel. If I enter a date in the format Google requires — e.g., 2006-10-12 — Excel automatically changes that to 10/12/2006. To keep the format unchanged, I have to put a single quotation mark in front of it — ‘2006-10-12. But then if I try to copy and paste that info (if it needs to be repeated over and over) Excel sometimes (apparently randomly) adds an extra single quotation mark, which also screw up Google Base. Also when I copy and paste descriptions and tables of contents from my store pages to the appropriate columns of Excel, Excel sometimes (not always and in a way that is not immediately evident) changes the format of that cell to “wrap”, which screws up the files when it is saves as tab-delimited text and hence for Google submission. Likewise, when I enter an ISBN number (the standard book indentification numbers used by publishers), which typically begins with a zero, I need to put a single quote before the zero or Excel automatically deletes the zero.

Images also posed a problem for me. And I still don’t know how the ordinary publisher would do that. Apparently, you need to provide a link to the image on the Web. A very helpful Google Base support person pointed out to me that my store pages at Yahoo already have images and that if you click on the image displayed with the description there, you get to a Web page that consists of just the image. Linking to that URL does the trick.

Then I recently made the mistake of by my copy and paste method including equal sites in a product description cell. Much to my surprise and confusion, that meant that the version saved as tab-delimited text was truncated at that cell. It took me a long time to figure out that the equal signs were causing the problem (thanks to my son Tim for figuring that one out). Once I eliminated the equal signs , all was well.

It has taken me maybe about 80 hours to sort all this out and get to the point that I can now upload new files with few errors and other slowdowns. I have only uploaded about half my products so far, but those I have are very easy to find in Froogle, and the search page links go straight to my store pages. I have not gotten any orders directly from Google (through their Google Checkout service), but I am getting significantly more traffic to my store pages, resulting in some new business.

Once it is easier to make submissions, and once this service is more closely integrated with Google Search, it could grow very rapidly and become an essential element of any online business. You could publish on the Web without having a Web site. And you could run the equivalent of an online store without having to pay for or design a store Web site and without even having a merchant credit card account.

I wish the folks at Google well. This is an amazing service. I hope they keep it free (or very inexpensive). And if you have an online business, you should start experimenting to see how this service could increase your traffic and boost your sales.

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