Introduction to Google Product Search

What is Google Product Search?

Google Product Search is a new service from Google that makes it easy to find information about products for sale online. By focusing entirely on product search, Google Product Search applies the power of Google's search technology to a very specific task: locating stores that sell the item you want to find and pointing you directly to the place where you can make a purchase.

It is located at https://www.google.com/products

Search results are limited to one product per store. Each result displays a thumbnail image of the product to the left, with the product's name, price and description listed to the right of the thumbnail. The store where the product is available is also listed, along with a link to see all results related to your keyword that are available at that particular merchant.

Google Product Search emphasis is on helping users find products, rather than providing product information, reviews, and other associated information found on other shopping search services.

What does it mean to you?

As an extension of the Google search engine that millions of people around the globe use daily to research products before they purchase, listing your product in Google Product Search is a free way to extend the reach of your marketing efforts to millions of customers.

There are two ways you can get included in Google Product Search

• The first, though not the most effective is to let Google or Google Product Search crawl your site and pick up the information for itself. This is likely to result in inaccuracies in your product listing.

• The second, and more effective way is to submit a data feed directly to Google Product Search. Create An Account With Google Product Search

To be eligible to submit a feed, you must sell products via your website and ship them to the buyer. If you sell services or custom products that do not have fixed prices, use your website only to promote an offline business, or are an affiliate marketing site, your site content may be crawled by and included in Google's web search, but it will not be included in Google Product Search. Nor will Google Product Search accept a data feed under these conditions. Merchants who meet Google Product Search's criteria and want to submit a data feed must allow Google to crawl their websites by removing any robots.txt files that disallow Googlebot spider.

To get an account you will need to send Google Product Search the following details about your company and you

• Your contact information

• Store Information ( Name & URL )

• Product information ( Numbers of products & Product Categories )

• Affiliate Information

Google say it takes anywhere between 5 to 10 business days to respond. My experience and from what I’ve heard from other merchants is that it takes about a week. You will receive an email from them asking you to read and agree to a legal agreement. Once you do this, you will receive another email with your account information: login ID and password. This last email will also contain FTP instructions.

The basic File Format has the following required parameters

• Tab-delimited text file

• Tab-delimited text file

• irst line of the file is the header - must contain field names, all lower-case

• Use the field names from the table below, and in the same column order

• One line per item(use a newline or carriage return to terminate the line)

• File Encoding is LATIN1(ASCII is fine as its is a subset of LATIN1)

The following field elements are forbidden as part of the basic format.If you want to include them as part of the basic format, products that contain errors will be dropped from the feed.

• Tabs, Carriage Returns , or newline characters may not be included in any fields, including the description

• Exactly one tab must seperate each field, If there are extra tabs inserted between fields in a line, or at the end of a line, that product will be dropped.

• HTML Tags, comments and escpe sequences may not be included- description must be plain text.

The basic data feed format consists of your product information in the following order:

There are more fields called Extended fields that you can use to further specify your product information, such as color, size, shipping cost and more. Optional extended headers may be used to flag special features of your file. You must use these header parameters if you use HTML escape characters, or include book, music or video products or use quotes in your product descriptions or names. If you have many items in your feed, only some of which change daily, you can provide updates-only files as a more efficient way for you to delete, add, or change offers for items. You can upload a full file later if a large percentage of your inventory changes.

Rules to be followed when creating the data feed format

Quotes, Tabs & Newslines

When quotes, tabs or newlines are present in your name, description or other fields, you must wrap the entire field (that contains the quotes or tabs) in quotes. You must also set the quoted extended format header value to “YES”.

Submission frequency

Data feeds for your online store must be submitted at least once a month. You can however submit your data feed file once a day. Currently the FTP server does not accept more frequent updates and returns the FTP code *****.

Currency, Availability

Right now, Google Product Search accepts only prices in US dollars. All your products must be available.

Removing products

To remove certain products from the data feed you could either

• Set the expiry date of the offer to some predefined date or

• Create and send an update file with the products marked for delete.

• Or when you send in the next feed remove those products completely.

Upload Your Data Feed

You can upload new feeds daily, weekly, or monthly. You must upload a new feed at least once a month, because Google Product Search will automatically expire your old data after a month. The content in your feed must be the same as the content visible to users on your web site. The description and price you provide in the feed must be the ones on your product URL page. The image URL should be that of the actual product image on the product page.

After you upload your feed for the first time, notify via email at feeds-support@google.com so that Google Product Search can confirm receipt and verify the accuracy of the format. Be sure to include your name, title, phone number and username in the email.

Is it Worth It?

If you spend just a little time surfing around Google Product Search, you'll see very quickly that some products have clear and enticing descriptions, while others seem to be random snippets from the product page. It's not enough to show up in the search, if the searcher doesn't click through to your site. Those with clear descriptions are from the sites that have taken the time to give Google Product Search their data feed. And those are the merchants who are winning on Google Product Serach.

 

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