I’m off to CA today. In the meantime, check out the string of comments below from the Froogle-Merchants Group…you can find similar comments every single day.
I haven’t taken the time to look at all the news surrounding Google Base, but what I find interesting is that Google is moving forward with it even though it’s clear [see below] the company can’t quickly and efficiently handle structured feeds which people are submitting to Froogle. As Debbie Jaffee, Sr. Product Manager at Google told me in an interview back in September, Froogle is a good exercise in learning how to accept information submitted by people vs. the crawling that Google is most known for.
Well it’s still an exercise. Froogle is still in Beta and needs some work as people have a lot of trouble submitting feeds. I’d ask for a comment from Froogle, but my last email went unanswered.
From the Froogle-Merchants Group
Date: Mon 31 Oct 2005 07:50
“Hi! I used to have some items listed on froogle… I was approuved and everything….The last time I uploaded my feed, I got some errors… I fixed them and now my feed outcome is success…But when I check for my item with “View this store on Froogle” there is NOTHING!! I uplaoded my feed 2 days ago! Any idea what is the problem?”
Date: Mon 31 Oct 2005 16:41
“I am having the same problem. Everything uploaded successfully, but nothing shows up when I try “View this store on Froogle” or searching for my item. I have the “Show this feed on Froogle” box checked. Any ideas?”
Date: Mon 31 Oct 2005 17:17
“I too have that problem, i uploaded origionally about 3 weeks ago, there were some errors, which i corrected and reuploaded 2 weeks ago, since then theyve listed successfully but still do not appear on froogle. Ive reuploaded now 4 times because of this to try overcome the issue. Its a good thing froogle is free, because if i were paying them id be sueing them”
Date: Tues 1 Nov 2005 02:11
“We are having a similar problem. We used to be listed but our products expired because we did not refresh the feed. A few days ago we uploaded a new feed and appear succesful in the merchant centre but are
still not re-listed in the store. I think there may be a backlog of feeds delaying the process.”
With so many people having so much trouble successfully submitting and listing their products on Froogle (myself included), what’s going to happen when people start submitting less structured data? Just thinking out loud…
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One other note on Google from Edge (the only pub that takes me longer to get through than The Economist). Larry Page was nominated for the $100k Edge of Computation Science Prize.
[...] hubby to crawl classifieds and other highly dynamic sites in real time. That’s fine. But why not make Froogle better and more generic? Accept merchant feeds with ease and then take on the ta [...]