Google Data » Denise

Casting call for our support team

Denise — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 02:26:00 +0000

By Alison Bjerke, Google Base Operations

If you've ever needed help with a bulk upload, you may have corresponded with one of our dedicated Google Base Coordinators. Even if you haven't, you might not be surprised to know that there's a team working behind the scenes to address your concerns, answer your questions and provide extra support -- when you need it. We thought you might like to know a little bit more about us. Read on for a few quirky tidbits:

We asked some of our Coordinators what movies they would pick to represent their life. Janna, who started with us this summer, admitted an affinity for "Legally Blonde." See what some reviewers on Google Base have to say about that.

Jane, one of our bulk upload reviewers, picked "Stand By Me." If you're feeling nostalgic for this classic, it's available from several providers. And "Transformers" also got an honorable mention from Chad. Maybe Chad saw the Transformers breakdancing on Google Video.

And have you seen this test to determine which John Cusack character you are? Well, Philip chose John Cusack as his doppelganger in "Say Anything." And finally, Jose imagined John Malkovich in "The Definitely Bearable Heaviness of Being." Take that, Kundera.

We'll be adding more about our team in the future, so watch this space to see what we're up to.

Preventing common errors in Google Maps bulk uploads

Denise — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 16:47:00 +0000

By Jen Peng, Google Base Operations

Among the many item types that you can submit to Google Base, we often see the same errors occur for bulk uploading of Google Maps business locations. Here are some of the most common errors, and ways to prevent them:

Upload 10 or more locations
To use the Google Maps business locations bulk upload feature, you must submit a minimum of 10 unique locations. If you have less than 10, please submit your information as individual items through the Google Local Business Center.

Submit in tab-delimited text format
Even though Google Base supports other formats for other item types, business location bulk uploads must be in tab-delimited text (.txt) to be recognized. Please refer to Step 4 of our tab-delimited bulk upload instructions for details on how to convert an Excel file to the proper format.

Select the correct item type
When specifying your bulk upload filename in your account, be sure to choose "Business locations" in the item type drop down. Creating a custom item type will prevent your locations from appearing in Google Maps.

Include all required attributes
To ensure that your business information appears properly, you need to include the following set of the attributes in your file: store_code, name, address_line_1, city, state, postal_code, country_code, main_phone. Please visit our formatting instructions for more details on each attribute.

And be sure to check out the Help Center for more formatting tips.

New rich text editing feature

Denise — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 19:22:00 +0000

By Deepak Lachwani, Google Base Engineering

To help you better describe your items, we're introducing a new rich text editor to our posting form. When you're posting an item, you can now format your description by using formatting buttons or by using HTML. The rich text editor provides you with a toolbar containing the most frequently used formatting options, and supports all standard HTML tags.

You can copy text from your browser and paste it into the editor, and the formatting will be retained. Thus you can easily reuse any HTML descriptions you already have on your site. You can also view and edit the HTML source directly, with an instant preview of your new description while editing.

Here's what the description box with the new toolbar looks like:

It's important to note, however, that at this time, we're not enabling any scripting, data input controls, or frames. Also, HTML descriptions are only available for single item posts.

Setting custom expiry dates

Denise — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 21:34:00 +0000

By Denise Gamboa, Associate Product Marketing Manager

We just rolled out a new feature that helps to ensure the content on Google Base is as fresh as possible. From now on, when you upload an item (either via a bulk upload or through the web form), we will set an appropriate expiry date for it. If you set your own date that isn't later than ours (for example, you set 1 week for a housing item, compared with our date 2 weeks out), we will honor your setting. However, anything later than our default settings will automatically revert to these custom dates below. There's more here on how to change expiry dates. And be sure to make note of these so that you can easily create upload schedules!

Jobs - 7 days
Travel Packages - 7 days
Events - 14 days
Housing - 14 days
Wanted ads - 15 days
People profiles - 30 days
Products - 30 days
Services - 30 days
Vehicles - 30 days
News and articles - don't expire
Podcasts - don't expire
Recipes - don't expire
Reference articles - don't expire
Reviews - don't expire

New for bulk uploaders: Google Checkout

Denise — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 19:13:00 +0000

By Alison Bjerke, Google Base Operations

Last week, we launched Google Checkout, a new process that enables customers to buy from sellers like you quickly and securely using a single username and password. When it's easy for customers to buy from you, you sell more. And when customers buy from you with Checkout, it's easy for you to charge your customers' credit cards, process orders, and deposit funds to your bank. Checkout also gives you the confidence to sell by identifying and filtering fraudulent transactions, fighting chargebacks, and reimbursing you for transactions covered by our Payment Guarantee policy.

If you already have a website containing information about the items you sell, you can integrate Google Checkout with your website to process transactions online. A few sellers are already using it. To learn more about integrating with Google Checkout, go here.

Wondering if you can still take advantage of Google Checkout even if you don't have a website? Well, through Google Base, you can sell items in two ways:

1) If you only have a few items to sell, you can submit a single item to Google Base and follow these steps to enable customers to buy from you using Google Checkout. Monster Magazine is a good example of a seller who has done this.

2) To sell multiple items without a website, specify Google Checkout as an accepted form of payment in your bulk upload, and we'll show a "Buy" button next to each of your items. They'll be displayed on pages like the single-item posts, but you don't have to create each post individually. Details about this option are here.

Where’s my stuff?

Denise — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 17:18:00 +0000

By Mike Perry, Online Operations Coordinator

Lately it seems there has been some confusion as to where your items will end up when you submit them to Google Base. Here's the skinny: you can certainly find your items in Google Base search results (which assures you they've been published live). But in order to draw searcher traffic, we also distribute your content to different Google search properties. So let's take a moment to talk about where standard item types appear now.

Product and vehicle item types will appear in Froogle search results as a rule, but in order to confirm a home for your data in Froogle, you will need to include values for all our required attributes. By submitting product/vehicle bulk uploads and including a value for the "location" attribute, you can also have your products included in Froogle Local search results, which provide product availability details for physical store locations in geographic locations . Learn more about the required attributes for products here.

Local business listings submitted to Google Base will appear on Google Maps. For example, a search for pizza in San Francisco on Google Maps returns locations and phone numbers for local pizzerias in the city. And when you submit your local business listing to us, either individually or in a bulk upload, it could also appear on Google Maps.

All other item types submitted using bulk upload files are eligible to run as an experiment that surfaces Google Base content in Google search results. And items such as recipes already appear as refinements in Google search results, because we think users ave a better experience when we enable them to refine their searches based on the attributes you provide.

Google Base for the UK and Germany

Denise — Wed, 31 May 2006 13:41:00 +0000

By Clay Bavor, Associate Product Manager

Today we're excited to announce the release of Google Base in Germany and the U.K., two more steps toward our goal of creating an easily searchable database of all the world's structured information. Google Base lets anyone submit information and have it show up on Google wherever it's relevant. Currently, relevant content submitted to Google Base can be found on Froogle, Google Maps, and Google web search.

Why is Google Base important? First, it simplifies the process by which people give Google information they want to share. Rather than having many places to upload information to Google, there's just one. Second, by accepting all sorts of structured content--that is, content with attributes like "color" or "square footage" or "location"--Google Base increases the comprehensiveness of Google search by making a wider variety of data available. Finally, the nature of Google Base's structured content makes it easier for users to find what they're looking for by using attributes to refine their search.

If you have information that you've always wanted people to see on the web, but have been waiting to put it out there--papers from college, a movie review, a good recipe for shortbread--help the world find it by submitting it to Google Base.

Create ads for your items

Denise — Sat, 13 May 2006 16:24:00 +0000

By Shamim Samadi, Google Base Operations

If you're familiar with Google AdWords, you'll be happy to know that we're now enabling you to create AdWords ads for individually posted items in Google Base, right from the Google Base edit item page.

Submitting an ad through Google Base is a quick and easy way to drive
additional highly targeted traffic to your Base items. You simply write the ad creative and tell us how much you're willing to spend and we'll do the rest. We'll automatically use the content from your Google Base item to target your ad to user queries, displaying your ads only when they are relevant. We'll even geo-target your ads to the most appropriate location. If you already have an AdWords account that uses the same Google Account login, we'll automatically include your Google Base ad in your AdWords account. If you're new to AdWords, we'll lead you through a few easy steps to set up an account.

Learn more about submitting ads through Google Base here.

Call for taxonomy leaders

Denise — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 23:20:00 +0000

By Denise Gamboa, Associate Product Marketing Manager

A unique feature of Google Base is the ability to create custom attributes and item types. This gives you an opportunity to include relevant information, no matter how obscure, detailed or specialized it is, about the content you want to share. For those of you who are already submitting data through Google Base, you've probably noticed that we have a finite set of item types to choose from and that for each item type, we have a finite set of suggested attributes. Though you always have the ability to create your own, we'd still like to present relevant suggestions for each item type that we call out.

Because you're the experts in your fields, we'd like you to tell us about what item types you'd like to see in the 'Choose an existing item type:' drop-down on the post an item page. We'd also love to know what attributes you think are most important for each item type. For example, if you're a photographer with interesting photos to share, license or sell, let us know what attributes make the most sense for your industry. Should we include print size, licensing information, place, camera etc? Or, if you're a collector of African art, what details do you and other collectors think are important when you evaluate your wares? Let us know by posting to the Base forum or via email at base-feedback@google.com. We'd love to hear from you.

Help us improve bulk uploading

Denise — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 18:00:00 +0000

By Donal Mountain, Google Base Usability

I'm a usability analyst on the Google Base team, and one thing I've been hearing many of you say is that bulk uploading is not as straightforward as you would like it to be. That's why we're currently working to improve this process . Here's your chance to have your say. So, if you have ever tried bulk uploading with Google Base:

* How did your first experience with bulk uploading go?
* How can bulk uploading be improved?
* What is your wishlist for bulk uploading?

Please email us with your answers. I've also started a topic on Google Groups, so you can chime in there as well, if you like. I'll be reading your responses carefully, and I may follow up with some of you, either individually or through this forum. However, I won't be able to answer specific questions about your account; please continue to send us those questions through Google Base support. The more we understand your needs, the better we can make Google Base. So let me hear your answers to these questions; I'm listening.

In the Spotlight: Podcast Supplemental

Denise — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 20:37:00 +0000

By Denise Gamboa, Associate Product Marketing Manager

You don't necessarily have to have lots of stuff to find Google Base useful. There are lots of you out there who have just a few recipes or one-off events that you'd like to post. Recently we caught up with Louis Privette, a University of Cincinnati student, about his productions. Here's what he had to say:

"My podcasts are best described as a hobbyist effort. I can't warrant the expense of a hosting service and don't currently have the knowledge to create a flashy media site to showcase this audio. I simply can't afford the costs involved. However, I do want to share with the world what I have made. I made them for an audience, after all.

Bringing attention to the mere existence of these podcasts is a great challenge. Without the good fortune (so far!) of word-of-mouth or a fan base, I have to make an extra effort to draw people to them. Which means I need a simple way to present this media. With my itinerant (student) lifestyle (read: relying on computer lab access), I usually don't have the freedom to install programs that would help me publish. Simplest for me is a web-based service.

So Google Base provides the closest means to self-publishing I have found. It's a permanent way to organize, archive, and encode ('tag') the contextual data of my content with the least upfront cost -- and without attention diverted away from my site. Basically I want to have my cake and eat it too :). If it helps enable people to find my podcasts, then my time expended in producing Podcast Supplemental is very much a worthwhile effort."

Thanks, Louis -- keep on producing and we'll keep listening.

Thinking about information discovery

Denise — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 17:51:00 +0000

By Bindu Reddy, Product Manager

The other day I realized that Google Base could evolve into an interesting tool for discovering content. Type in any query and you'll get a variety of item types which you then refine. The query [cancer] gives you clinical trials, reference articles and books, and the query [carrot cake] gives you recipes, products and even reviews.

Even more interesting are attributes within an item type. For example,

- browse job listings to learn that Ernst and Young has 62 job openings in San Francisco and 147 openings in New York
- there are more results for Chinese chicken recipes than there are Greek ones
- and way more protein receptors in mus musculus (a.k.a the common house mouse) than in e-coli (bacteria).

These are just a few interesting ways to browse and visualize semi-structured and structured data. Tell us how to do it in even more meaningful ways.

In the Spotlight: David Sanger Photography

Denise — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 18:40:00 +0000

By Denise Gamboa, Product Marketing Manager

Since launch, people have found creative ways to use Google Base to their advantage, whether for personal or business use. Some of you have even written to let us know about your experience. Here is David Sanger's story about how Google Base has helped his stock photography business.

Photograph (c) David Sanger Photography

"My business as a stock photographer involves the licensing of images and selling fine art prints to business and personal users.

Since our website already has a searchable database of images with extensive keywording, buyers can search the site for images under any combination of keywords like "Golden Gate Bridge" or "South Africa wines" or "romantic tropical beach". Each image has a dedicated page with a unique URL where a buyer can license the image or order a fine art print from our specialty printer, Pictopia.

What was missing was a place for the general public to easily conduct such a search, and Google Base provided the perfect solution. Buyers can search for golden gate bridge fine art prints or south africa pictures or romantic tropical beach prints and order their prints directly.

The master database is kept in Filemaker Pro and we already had an extract to upload to MYSQL on our web host. Google Base offers the option to bulk upload a file as a tab-delimited text file or in various XML formats. We chose to use the text file. With Filemaker it was easy to define additional fields to create an extract file with the image URL, a link to the image thumbnail, descriptive info including keywords, and some custom attributes. Setting up the FTP access went quickly and within a few hours the records were uploaded. It still took several days to work out details, making changes along the way. One of the best points about Google Base is that you can re-upload whenever you want, to add new images and correct or adjust keywords.

For a small stock photography business the most difficult task is to get visibility for individual offerings. We already use Google Sitemaps and Google Images to gain visibility but there's currently no option for adding descriptive, searchable metadata. Google Base offers the flexibility and quick turnaround we need to post new material and to change product details. The custom attributes will allow us to fine tune the offering over time.

In terms of results, our recent Christmas print sales were the best ever. Recent sales through Google, Froogle and Google Base include a BMW dealer looking for large photo murals of Oktoberfest and a Hollywood film studio looking for a Prague street scene.

As a Board member of Stock Artists Alliance, the professional association for stock photographers, I am also keenly aware of the need for new ways for individual photographers to offer their images to the market. Google Base certainly has the potential to empower small stock photo businesses to reach out to buyers worldwide."

Google Base at CES

Denise — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 22:41:00 +0000

By Denise Gamboa, Product Marketing Manager

If you attended CES in Las Vegas last week, you probably caught a glimpse of the Google booth. We were there conducting demos of Google Base along with a dozen or so other products.

Photograph taken by Shamim

Google booth - South Hall Las Vegas Convention Center

Photograph taken by Shamim

Google booth - robotic arm

Photograph taken by Denise

Bindu answering questions at Google Base station

Photograph taken by Shamim

Denise at Google Base station

Over four days (January 5th-8th) we met people from all sorts of different backgrounds: an exchange student from France, small business owners, real estate agents, professors, investors, reporters and webmasters. We found that Google Base is useful to people in different ways. Students are interested in sharing information about their classes, their work and their social lives. Business owners want to drive additional visibility to their websites and to the products/services that they want to sell. Webmasters want more traffic and are curious about integrated features that Google Base has to offer. In every case, it was exciting to meet our users and answer questions that you had.

Your favorite features and functionality:

1. Possible distribution to other Google properties like Google, Froogle and Google Local
2. It's free!
3. Attribute search
4. Ability to define your own attributes and keywords
5. Ability to bulk upload items
6. Ability to link to your own website
7. Email anonymization
8. Google maps integration

Top inquiries we received (linked to corresponding answers):

1. What is Google Base?
2. What type of information can I submit to Google Base?
3. Can I upload digital files?
4. Is it free? No way!
5. What if I have lots of things to share?
6. What are custom attributes?

Many people were also interested in hearing about coming features and future plans. Stay tuned to find out more about those! We have some exciting things lined up!

In the Spotlight: Solomodels

Denise — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 20:57:00 +0000

By Denise Gamboa, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Among the recipes, course schedules and events that can be found on Google Base, we came across a service called Solomodels. It’s a web solution for models and photographers, created by a group of software engineers, graphic artists and flash programmers. This site incorporates Flash pages, private galleries, group discussions, and competitions to entertain searchers while driving exposure to its clients. We found it by searching on [fashion model].

Hoss Etemad from Solomodels talks a bit about their experience with Google Base:

“Our mission at Solomodels is to provide a one-stop solution for the fashion industry by bringing worldwide exposure to top models and photographers. The Google Base program, which we found through Google AdWords on Google.com, has allowed us to quickly and seamlessly publish thousands of member portfolios free of charge. By including related tags such as “fashion” and “modeling” as well as photos and geographical locations, anyone looking to hire a fashion model or photographer can quickly find them on Google Base with a simple search. If they need more information about a listed member, they just have to click their link to be taken to their complete portfolio on Solomodels. Publishing our member lists to Google Base has not only increased the traffic to our member portfolios, but also resulted in a number of members finding modeling and photography type work because of their listing.

We generated an XML file using the Google Base bulk uploads instructions for reference. Because the process is so simple and the exposure on Google so valuable, we plan on updating our content at least once a month.”