Base: Google Base Blog

Video: Product Search for Webmasters

2009-07-09T15:05:00.000-07:00

As a member of the Google Developer team, I filmed a video about Google Product Search for our webmaster community. In it, I discuss the benefits of Product Search, suggest best practices when submitting a feed, and answer frequently asked questions such as:

Do listings expire after 30 days?
How often should I submit a feed?
How are different sites sorted in search results when there are multiple results for the same product?
Why doesn't Google badge PayPal accepting merchants as well as Checkout?
Does it help search rankings to add custom attributes to my product feeds?

Posted by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Reminder: Submit Your Store Locations

2009-07-01T17:50:00.000-07:00

We posted a few weeks ago about an experiment we're working on to display store locations to consumers on Google Product Search. If you have local stores and haven't already submitted your information to the Local Business Center, there's still time! As a reminder, here are the instructions:

First, go to www.google.com/lbc. Then:

If you're able to verify ownership of your store locations by receiving a phone call or a postcard at each location, please add and verify your stores individually by using the "Add new business" option.

If you have 10 or more stores, or if you're unable to individually verify all of your locations, you can bulk upload your listings as unverified data by choosing the "Upload a data file" option. Then, fill out this form to help us associate your Local Business Center data with your Google Base account.

Posted by Paul Lee, Business Product Manager, Google Product Search

New Data Feed Interface Improvements

2009-06-24T13:42:00.000-07:00

Last week, several members of the Google Product Search team went to the Internet Retailer Conference & Expo in Boston, where we had a chance to meet with some of our content providers. We got some great feedback about Product Search and Google Base at the conference, from success stories to feature requests. This sort of user feedback is a crucial part of the development process at Google - it directly impacts focus areas for our engineers and product teams. For example, a top request from our merchants has been for more information about their data feeds, and I'm happy to announce that as a result of that feedback we've launched a new data feed interface in all Google Base accounts.

You can see this new interface in the "Data feeds" section of the "My Items" tab. First, you'll notice that we now show the number of inserted items for the feeds you've submitted in the "Last upload data & status" column. Also in that column, you'll see a link called "View errors and suggestions." This link takes you to a page which details feed-level and item-level errors and warnings, so you can more easily take action to get all your items submitted, with all relevant attributes. If you haven't seen these new features yet, sign in to your Google Base account and check them out today.

Posted by Chris Azalde, Google Base Support

Local Business Information and Store Locations

2009-06-10T13:09:00.000-07:00

Usually, I do my shopping online - I can browse from the comfort of my home or office and compare across multiple stores before I purchase. Occasionally, however, when I'm heading out on a trip or I have to buy a last-minute birthday present, I don't have time to wait for a product to ship. To help users with this problem, we've begun experimenting with exposing store locations in Google Product Search, and we'd like to invite you to participate. We think this will help users find nearby store locations, and help merchants get foot traffic into their stores.

To participate in this experiment, all you need to do is submit your store locations to the Google Local Business Center, which allows business owners to control the content of their business listings as they appear in Google Search and Google Maps.

Submitting your store locations to the Google Local Business Center is easy. First, go to www.google.com/lbc. Then:

If you're able to verify ownership of your store locations by receiving a phone call or a postcard at each location, please add and verify your stores individually by using the "Add new business" option.

If you have 10 or more stores, or if you're unable to individually verify all of your locations, you can bulk upload your listings as unverified data by choosing the "Upload a data file" option. Then, fill out this form to help us associate your Local Business Center data with your Google Base account.

Regardless of which method you use to submit your data, use the same email address you use to log in to Google Product Search.

As a bonus, the Google Local Business Center just released the Local Business Center dashboard, a completely free feature that allows business owners to view a range of information about how Google users find their business listings on Google - from the number of clicks your listing received to the zip codes from which users are driving when they request directions to your store. Currently, this dashboard is only available to business owners who can verify each store location via phone or postcard.

Posted by Paul Lee, Business Product Manager, Google Product Search

Condition Attribute Becoming Required for Google Product Search

2009-06-02T10:30:00.000-07:00

We'd like to let you know about an important change we're making to the Product Search data feed requirements. As you know, you can help shoppers find your products by including high quality, frequently updated product information in the form of attributes. In order to provide shoppers with the most useful information, we'll be making the "condition" attribute required starting on June 30th, 2009, in all locations.

In order to keep your feeds active past this date, please remember to include the "condition" attribute for all of your items if you're not already doing so. Please include one of three values to describe your product: new, used, or refurbished.

For more information, please visit the following help center article:

English - United States

English - United Kingdom

Deutsch - Deutschland

Posted by Janna Salinas, Google Base Support

New Base Terms of Service

2009-05-26T13:21:00.000-07:00

Today, we're making some changes to the Google Base Terms of Service. We've also added a section to the Settings tab called "Business Information," which will enable you to associate more information about your business with your listings in Google Base. You will be prompted to accept the new Terms of Service and add your business information the next time you log in to Google Base.

To ensure that we are able to continue processing your feeds and placing your listings on Google properties, please log in to your account and accept the new Terms of Service by June 26, 2009. If you use the API and do not accept the new Terms of Service after logging in to your Base account by June 26th, your API applications may not function properly.

Posted by Ioannis Kalafatis, Product Manager, Google Base

Help mobile users find your offers

2009-05-20T12:01:00.000-07:00

We're excited to announce that Google Product Search for Mobile recently launched barcode scanning on Android devices. In order for your product offer to be listed when a user searches using their barcode scanner, you need to include a unique product identifier attribute like a Universal Product Code (UPC) or European Article Number (EAN) in your data feed. For more information on unique product identifier attributes, please see this article in the Google Base Help Center.

Posted by Vivek Tata, Marketing Manager, Google Product Search

Introducing Google Product Search for mobile

2009-04-23T10:06:00.000-07:00

Today, we launched Google Product Search for mobile for iPhone and Android-powered devices. When mobile users search for products on the go they can get quick access to product information -- like online product ratings, reviews, prices, and more -- formatted neatly for their phones.

If you've already submitted items to Google Product Search, you don't have to do anything extra to get your product information to show up on Google Product Search for mobile. If your items are not yet listed in Product Search, it's easy: just submit your product information using this guide and keep submitting frequently to keep your listings up to date.

This is also a good opportunity for you to create mobile versions of your landing pages. Although the iPhone and Android browsers can render many web pages as they are, you may want to consider optimizing your landing pages for mobile browsers to improve the user experience.

Here's a video of my colleague demonstrating Google Product Search for mobile at our company store.

Posted by Eiji Hirai, Software Engineer, Google mobile team

Data Quality tab now available for merchants in the UK and Germany

2009-03-30T21:38:00.000-07:00

Since we launched the Data Quality tab in Google Base accounts a few months ago, merchants in the US have been able to get customized suggestions for improving the quality of their data submissions. Today, we're excited to announce that the Data Quality tab is now available to all merchants in Germany and the UK.

On the Data Quality tab, you can find a number of recommendations that will help you with submitting higher quality data to Google Product Search. This means submitting accurate, up-to-date product information in the form of attributes, as well as abiding by best practices for formatting these attributes. For example, you can find recommendations on the length of your titles and descriptions, or get a snapshot of the number of items in your account that are missing key attributes like EAN, UPC, and ISBN. By including attributes like EAN, UPC, and ISBN, you're providing more information to help us include your products on Google Product Search product pages, which shoppers utilize to determine which merchant to buy from when multiple stores are selling the same product. Addressing the issues listed on your Data Quality tab will go a long way in improving the quality of your product data and help more shoppers find your products.

We hope that you'll find these recommendations helpful, and that they will help you make the most of the spring selling season.

Posted by: Dom Widdows, Software Engineer, and Travis Keep, Software Engineer

New Google Base Help Forum

2009-01-22T14:33:00.000-08:00

Greetings and Happy New Year to all of our Google Base users! As you may know, we've recently launched the new Google Base Help Forum. While our previous group served as a resource for you to ask questions, find answers, and share your expertise with other users, it's our hope that the new forum will help you do all of that and much, much more.

We've developed many new and exciting features which we think will make it easier and quicker for you to find the answers that you're looking for (and maybe even have some fun while doing it.) Some of the things you're able to do in this new system include:

give special recognition to helpful forum members (they''ll be marked as "Top Contributors")
mark questions as "answered"
enhance your user profile; even upload a photo which will appear next to your name.

If you'd like to learn more about Google's new Help Forums or watch an instructional video, please visit the Official Google Blog.

As a new year of shopping gets under way, we hope you'll come by and check out the new and improved Google Base Help Forum. Happy posting!

Posted by Janna Salinas, Google Base Support

Tax and shipping estimates on Google Product Search

2008-12-03T12:27:00.000-08:00

Knowing the full price of a product, including tax and shipping costs, is extremely important to buyers when making purchase decisions. To provide our users with this information, we recently started including tax and shipping estimates on Google Product Search results in the U.S. You will now be able to see tax and shipping costs displayed alongside the product listings for which merchants have submitted this information. As the holiday shopping season progresses, we strongly encourage you to start submitting tax & shipping data for all your products if you haven't done so already. It's a great way to maximize the visibility of your products during this critical shopping period. Here's more information on how to do so.

Posted by Yi Wei, User Experience Designer, and Kyle Consalus, Software Engineer

Some of the season's top searches on Google Product Search

2008-12-01T10:31:00.000-08:00

We hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Now that it's Cyber Monday and online shopping is in full swing, we've put together some of the top searches on Google Product Search to help shoppers find popular gifts for their family and friends. We pored over millions of recent queries to find some of the most searched for products this holiday.

Here are some of the top searches we found:
1. nintendo wii
2. wii fit
3. ipod touch
4. xbox 360
5. nintendo ds
6. ipod nano
7. uggs
8. nikon d90
9. zune
10. digital picture frame

We also took a look at the top searches in a few other categories, such as Video Games & Toys and Cold Weather apparel. Here are some of the top searches in the Cold Weather apparel category:
1. pea coat
2. north face jacket
3. sweater dress
4. sweater boots
5. leather jacket
6. christmas sweater
7. ugly christmas sweater
8. houndstooth coat
9. burton jacket
10. dog sweater

Explore a full list of these popular searches on the Google Holiday Shopping page. We hope that these lists will help shoppers put together their gift lists and find their favorite products on Google Product Search, as well as connect them to the merchants who are selling these items. Happy Cyber Monday, and happy shopping!

To read more about how Google is celebrating the holidays with shoppers, take a look at the Official Google Blog.

Posted by Jessica Ng, Product Marketing Manager

Top 5 holiday tips for Google Product Search merchants

2008-11-06T12:57:00.000-08:00

The year-end holidays are the biggest shopping season, and we know that many of you have been busy with your site preparations for months. To help, here are some tips on how to get the most out of your Google Product Search feeds this holiday. They can help you improve the quality of your data feeds, prioritize the types of data to send us, and help more shoppers find your products.

Submit tax and shipping data for your items: We'll soon be displaying tax and shipping information on Google Product Search to provide buyers with more accurate price information. Buyers use tax and shipping estimates to help them determine what to buy and which merchant to buy it from, so we strongly encourage all merchants to submit this data. Here's more information on how to do so.

Include unique product identifiers: In addition to using our five required attributes, be sure to include the recommended attributes relevant to your products, such as product identifiers like MPN, UPC, or ISBN. By including these, you're giving us more information to help us include your products on Google Product Search product pages (our merchant comparison pages) when multiple merchants are selling the same product.

Use effective titles: There's nothing like an accurate title to tell shoppers at a glance exactly what you're selling, so be sure to use detailed and descriptive titles for your products. Do keep in mind that Product Search truncates titles to under 70 characters, so avoid exceedingly lengthy titles.

Write accurate descriptions: Descriptions offer an overview of the product you're selling, so make sure that your descriptions are accurate and more than a few words in length. But if your descriptions are over 150 characters, you may want to shorten them to only include the most crucial information, as Product Search truncates longer descriptions.

Submit your feeds frequently: Lastly, remember to submit your data feeds regularly -- up to once a day -- to ensure that your product information is current for shoppers.

We hope that these tips will help you make the most of the holiday shopping season. For more holiday tips relating to other Google products that online retailers use (such as Google AdWords), please visit this page.

Posted by: Jessica Ng, Product Marketing Manager

Get customized suggestions for improving your product listings

2008-10-31T09:19:00.000-07:00

We've always emphasized the importance of submitting high-quality product feeds to Google Product Search. This means submitting accurate, up-to-date product information in the form of attributes, as well as abiding by best practices for formatting these attributes. Doing so goes a long way toward helping shoppers find your items more easily.

Today, we're pleased to announce the addition of a new "Data Quality" tab in your Google Base account. On this tab, you'll find a host of suggestions for improving the quality of the item listings in your product feed. For example, you can find recommendations on the length of your title and description fields, or get a snapshot of the number of items in your feed that are missing key attributes. By addressing these issues, you'll be able to improve the quality of your feeds and help more shoppers find your products.

We hope you're as excited about this new tab as we are, and that you'll find the recommendations helpful.

Posted by: Jessica Ng, Product Marketing Manager

New taxonomy to describe the product type of your items

2008-10-27T18:47:00.000-07:00

We've received some feedback from Google Product Search merchants asking for more direction on which values to include for the product_type attribute. We listened to your feedback, and today we're unveiling our new categorization system that you can use for describing the product type of your items. Product_type is an optional attribute that you can use to indicate the category (or categories) of the product being sold. We recommend that you use the category paths and values from our new product taxonomy.

The Google product taxonomy is a tree of categories that describe product families, with verticals (Electronics, Home & Garden, etc.) at the highest level, followed by more specific product families or products within these broad categories (such as Electronics > Audio > Audio Players & Recorders > MP3 Players).

If you already have a system of categorization of your own, you may also use that. Just include the full category path as the value for the product_type attribute (e.g., Books > Non-Fiction > Sports > Baseball).

We hope that this new taxonomy provides you with more suggestions on how to accurately describe your items, so that you can help even more shoppers find your products! For more information on our taxonomy and instructions on how to format the product_type attribute, please read this Help Center article.

Posted by: Weiying Li, Google Base Support

Introducing tax and shipping

2008-10-21T10:18:00.000-07:00

Tax and shipping estimation is one of the features most commonly asked for by shoppers on Google Product Search. Today, I’m happy to announce that you can now submit tax and shipping information for your products via your Google Base account. We'll soon be displaying this information on Google Product Search to provide buyers with more accurate price information, so we strongly encourage all merchants to start submitting it.

You'll be able to submit your tax and shipping data in two ways. You can:

1. Set default values directly in your Google Base account. The rates and values you set will serve as the default values for all your items. You can input these values on the new "Tax and Shipping settings" tab under “Settings” in your account.

2. Include values for the new tax and shipping attributes in your data feeds. These values will override any account-level default values that you have set for that item.

Please visit our Help Center article for step-by-step instructions and more information on formatting the new tax and shipping attributes.

Posted by: Jessica Ng, Product Marketing Manager

Google Product Search now accepting alternative feed formats

2008-09-04T09:32:00.000-07:00

We understand it can be time-consuming for merchants to prepare their product feeds for multiple shopping engines, each with their own formats and standards. That's why we're introducing a new uploading option that enables merchants to submit information to Google Product Search using existing data feeds they’ve prepared for other shopping engines.

You can take advantage of this option when you register your data feed in your account. Select the type of feed you’re registering and then chose from a drop-down list of feed formats. We'll automatically format your feeds for proper integration and uploading into Google Product Search.

We hope this new uploading option makes it easier and more convenient for merchants everywhere to upload their items to Google Product Search. If you're submitting feeds to other shopping engines, you can begin submitting your products for inclusion right now, and start driving traffic to your site with very little effort or time required.

If you're an existing Google Product Search provider, please continue submitting your feeds in the Google Base format to take advantage of optional and custom attributes.

For more details and step-by-step instructions about uploading with alternative feed formats, please visit our Help Center article.

Posted by: Jessica Ng, Product Marketing Manager

Get feedback on your items' performance

2008-07-30T11:45:00.000-07:00

Google Base now offers more feedback on the performance of your items. Log in to your Google Base account and click on the new "Performance" tab.
You'll find information on how many items you have uploaded and how many of the items are active. You can also see how many clicks your items received on Google (e.g. on Product Search or on Real Estate search) and how many were retrieved through the Google Base Data API.

This new tool will allow you to spot trends with historical graphs of your account performance. You can also download detailed tables that show the performance of each of your top items.

We're excited about this new feature and hope you find it useful. More information can be found in our Help Center. And please share your feedback with us here.

Posted by Matthias Ernst, Software Engineer

Google Base account now international

2008-05-09T17:11:00.000-07:00

Posted by Gilbert Dietrich, German Google Base Team

Many of you have been asking for a way to easily upload and publish items for different countries to Google Base from the comfort of your account. We listened to your feedback and have created an international dashboard within your Google Base account, which lets you select different target countries for your feeds. This means that you no longer need to log in to three separate domains (.com .co.uk, and .de) to submit feeds to each country. Now you can simply log in to your usual account and have access to all your feeds, regardless of the country for which they were registered.

For example, if you select "US" as your target country from the drop-down menu instead of "All", only your US feeds will be displayed in your account. Within your Account Settings you can also choose a dashboard display language of your choice, independent of the country to which you are submitting your feeds.

Additionally, you can easily register your feeds for the various countries using one account. During the registration process, if you want to specify a location different than your default target country, you will be able to choose your desired target country for that particular feed.

Please visit our Help Center for more information on this topic. As always, we welcome any suggestions for ways we can make it even easier for you to upload and publish your items to Google Base.

Updating our attribute requirements for submitting products

2008-05-01T09:18:00.000-07:00

Posted by Jessica Ng, Product Marketing Manager

If you're a Google Product Search provider, you've always known that we classify our attributes into three categories: "required," "recommended," and "optional." We've recently updated the list of attributes in each category to make it easier for providers to submit their product information and prioritize the attributes relevant to their products. Here is an updated list of attribute requirements, along with some information on what the categories mean.

Required attributes are attributes that you're, well, required to include for all your items. We won't be able to process and approve items in your feed that are missing required attributes. The following is a list of required attributes:

description
id
link
price
title

Recommended attributes are ones that we strongly recommend including for your data feeds, and we consider them as important as required attributes. However, we realize that not all providers and items have this information available; therefore, if your feed contains items without this information, we will still process them, but it will be more difficult to ensure that they appear for relevant search queries. The following is a list of recommended attributes:

brand
condition
image_link
isbn
mpn
upc

All other attributes are optional attributes. Optional attributes give you more ways to describe your items and additionally help shoppers find your products.

We hope that this update will make it easier for you to create data feeds and prioritize the time spent on them. For more information on these attributes, you can visit our feed guidelines here. Also, keep your eyes out for status messages on the data feeds dashboard that will provide additional guidance on the attributes we're recommending for your items.

To see attribute requirements for submitting item types other than Products, please visit the data feed overview in the Help Center.

Zappos.com finds the perfect fit with Google Product Search

2008-04-28T11:51:00.000-07:00

Posted by Alyssa England, Associate Product Marketing Manager

In Q1, we attended several industry events where merchants were interested in hearing about other merchants' experiences with our commerce solutions products, particularly Google Product Search. With that in mind, we wanted to share some feedback we recently received from Zappos.com.

Zappos offers shoes, bags, and apparel as an online retailer that stocks more than 3 million SKUs and has more than 7 million customers. Zappos started using Google Product Search to drive more traffic and sales to their site.

In a case study, Darrin Shamo, manager of Zappos' SEM/SEO initiatives, recently shared with us that "Product Search brought in an average of 380,000 visitors a month during the vital holiday shopping season of November-December 2007 -- an increase of 400% over the year before. And the conversion rate was higher than all other comparison shopping engines in our portfolio."

"Our objective here is to lower marketing costs while hitting our target return on investment (ROI) across campaigns," Shamo continued. "Google Product Search is free, and that helps us accomplish this goal. By adding Product Search to our comparison shopping engine mix, we are able to boost our aggregate ROI by 11%."

Learn more about Google Product Search.

Schedule your data feeds

2008-04-23T09:39:00.000-07:00

Posted by Dimitris Meretakis, Product Manager

To keep your items in Base current, you should send us a new data feed as often as your item information changes. The great news is that you don't have to send us your file manually anymore. Now Google Base can download your data feed from your website. Here's how to get started:

Make sure your updated data feed is available on a fixed, externally accessible URL on your website.
Define the schedule that Google Base should follow to retrieve the bulk upload file from that URL.

Google Base will retrieve and process your data feed according to the schedule you define. You can set daily, weekly or monthly schedules and specify the exact time your file should be retrieved. Just make sure that your bulk upload URL belongs to the website you registered in your Account Settings. Within your Account Settings you can also choose whether you want to receive email notifications when Base retrieves and processes your data feed. You can find all the details and step-by-step instructions about setting your schedule in our Help Center article.

Publishing priority for Base API items

2008-04-10T09:47:00.000-07:00

Posted by Dimitris Meretakis, Product Manager

The Google Base data API is used to manage and publish all kinds of data. Some of this data is particularly time-sensitive, like news or events that will expire in a matter of hours. Other data has more value over the long term, such as recipes that are intended to be used and shared indefinitely.

To streamline the publishing process and make sure that time-sensitive items appear in the snippets feed as quickly as possible, Google Base now differentiates between high- and low-priority items. High-priority items are published immediately. Low-priority items are published to the snippets feed within a day, and are still instantly available on the items feed.

For now, the default priority is "high." On May 8, we'll set the default priority to "low" and set quotas for high-priority items to ensure fairness. We'll provide more information about quotas in an upcoming blog post, so keep your eyes peeled.

For detailed information about how the new priorities work, refer to the documentation. As always, if you have questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you.

Thanks for your participation in Google Base.

New API Features

2008-01-09T00:53:00.001-08:00

By Alex Dovlecel, Google Base API Engineering Team

If you've been wondering what the Google Base API team has been working on lately, wonder no more. We are happy to tell you that a couple of new features were released in the last couple of weeks.

Location queries
We think locations are extremely useful for building a large variety of applications. Mashups of Google Maps spring to mind. They look cool and are easy to develop. That's why we devoted some of our time to improving location queries.Now you can:

Query addresses: The radius (or lack thereof) in a location query will help you tune your results. If a radius is not provided, Google Base will match the items that are located in the specified area (zip code, city, state, country). If you include a radius, then Google Base will return the items located at a distance less than the radius from the center of the specified area. Sounds complicated? It's not. Let's take a couple of examples:
[location:@"Mountain View, CA"] will match items located in the city of Mountain View, California. It doesn't matter if they are close or far from the center of the town.
[location:@"Mountain View, CA" + 1mi] will match items located within one mile of Mountain View's geographic center.
[location:@"Washington"] will match items located in Washington. You can do the same for countries by replacing Washington with a country name like Switzerland, or France. By providing a ZIP code in the address string, like in this query: [location:@"93430, CA"] the API will make sure to return only items that are located in the given zip code (Mountain View, California).

Query rectangular areas: For certain types of applications (like Google Maps mashups), querying for a rectangular lat/long boundary is important. Now you can easily do this by using the following syntax: [location: @+12.9+12.20..@+14.5+12.45].

For more information about location queries, refer to the developer's guide.

Reference attributes
We know items are not always isolated entities. Sometimes it makes sense to have one item point to another. Of course, you can build a relation between two items by using attributes of type "url", but that can be cumbersome. To address this case, we introduced a new "reference" attribute type. Now you can insert an item containing attributes that reference another Google Base item by passing the ID of the referenced item. For example the attribute
<g:my_ref_attribute type='reference'>17891817243016304554> refers to the item that can be accessed at http://www.google.com/base/feeds/snippets/17891817243016304554
You can also query for items that reference another item. The query [my ref attribute(reference): 17891817243016304554] will return all the items that have a reference attribute named "my ref attribute" which points to the item identified by http://www.google.com/base/feeds/snippets/17891817243016304554.

Make no mistake - Google Base is definitely not a relational database. You can't do join operations in queries. Google Base does not enforce referential integrity for your items. References can help you interconnect your data, so that you or anyone else who finds your data can more easily navigate from one item to the next.
For more information about reference attributes, refer to the developer's guide.

Images and thumbnails
If you want to embed images for items in Google Base in your website, we have good news for you. Images are now stored at base.googlehosted.com, and you can link to them directly. The Base API also supports a new value for the content query parameter called thumbnails. If you include the thumbnails argument, all of your g:image_link attributes will include links to the related thumbnails.

For example, querying reviews for "Golden Compass":
http://www.google.com/base/feeds/snippets/-/reviews?bq=golden+compass&content=thumbnails

... will return, among the others, the item:
http://www.google.com/base/feeds/snippets/11204632290451546619

...which contains links to thumbnails:

<g:image_link type='url'>http://i.walmart.com/i/p/09/78/06/79/87/0978067987924_100X100.jpg
  <gm:thumbnail width='60' height='60'>
http://base.googlehosted.com/base_media?q=http%3A%2F%2Fi.walmart.com%2Fi%2Fp%2F09%2F78%2F06%2F79%2F87%2F0978067987924_100X100.jpg&dhm=ffffffff80c81128&size=5
  </gm:thumbnail>
  <gm:thumbnail width='90' height='90'>
http://base.googlehosted.com/base_media?q=http%3A%2F%2Fi.walmart.com%2Fi%2Fp%2F09%2F78%2F06%2F79%2F87%2F0978067987924_100X100.jpg&dhm=ffffffff80c81128&size=2
  </gm:thumbnail>
  <gm:thumbnail width='120' height='120'>
http://base.googlehosted.com/base_media?q=http%3A%2F%2Fi.walmart.com%2Fi%2Fp%2F09%2F78%2F06%2F79%2F87%2F0978067987924_100X100.jpg&dhm=ffffffff80c81128&size=3
  </gm:thumbnail>
  <gm:thumbnail width='220' height='220'>
http://base.googlehosted.com/base_media?q=http%3A%2F%2Fi.walmart.com%2Fi%2Fp%2F09%2F78%2F06%2F79%2F87%2F0978067987924_100X100.jpg&dhm=ffffffff80c81128&size=4
  </gm:thumbnail>
</g:image_link>

For more information about using images in your application, refer to the developer's guide.

We hope these new features will spark some ideas for applications to build on top of Google Base. The more you use the API, the more we'll give back. Stay tuned to find out about more new features coming soon.

Feed status notifications

2007-12-12T11:41:00.000-08:00

By: Dimitris Meretakis, Product Manager

You may not be aware of the steps your uploaded data goes through on Google Base. Here's a snapshot. First, you upload your file; next, Google processes your feed; and third, after processing is complete, users will be able to see your data in their search results.

And starting today, you have the option of receiving a notification email after we've completed the processing (the second step), which will summarize the results. To turn this on, go to Settings. You can choose whether you want to be notified in one of three instances: always, only if there's an error, or never. Learn more about status notifications.