I assume you are familiar with Google Base already so we couldn’t ignore the update of this effective merchants’ resource. Online merchants are promoted to submit more attributes along with basic product description to give users more parameters to compare when searching for a particular item. Besides, Google reminds that “including as many attributes as possible will increase your items’ exposure in search results”. The required for each product attributes include:

• brand
• condition
• description
• expiration_date
• id
• image_link
• link
• price
• product_type
• Title

Google also “strongly recommend” the use of some additional elements which “will increase your items’ exposure in search results”:

• payment_accepted
• payment_notes
• pickup
• price_type
• quantity
• shipping
• tax_percent
• tax_region

While more sophisticated users can take an advantage of uploading additional information for their goods such as color, film type, focus type, megapixels, model number, resolution, size, tech spec link, upc, zoom for cameras or artist, department, material, occasion, style for jewelry.

The complete list of attributes defined by Google could be found here.

Check this out.

Looks like the MSN Adcenter had a bit of a hiccup this morning, and they have decided to pull it offline for the remainder of the business day. This was a unplanned outage and is not a good sign, especially for the efficacy of new technology platforms.

In the PPC world having your top 3 keyword bid management systems come down is wuite possible the worst thing that can happen - just ask Yahoo! why they decided to put the ole aginag Overture DTC finally to rest.

In a recent BusinessWeek article, Google and Yahoo we’re compared. More specifically Yahoo’s Panama project was compared to Googles recent innovations. According to the article:

Using data on total search queries, released by comScore, Caris & Co. analyst Tim Boyd estimates that Yahoo made on average between 10¢ and 11¢ per search in 2006, bringing in a total of $1.61 billion for the first nine months of the year. Google, meanwhile, makes between 19¢ and 21¢ per search. As a result, it made an estimated $4.99 billion during the same period.

This is incredible data (even if extrapolated), directionally it means Google is approx 200% better at monetizing search queries vs. Yahoo. The ironic part is, Yahoo! has more experience at this game, and the scenarios imho should be flipped. Let’s see who wins in the end, or who acquires Yahoo! first - Microsoft, or a Media Giant like ClearChannel.

I walked into my office this morning, and was delighted to see a gift from Google all wrapped up. Once I opened the package, to my suprise there was a neatly wrapped iPod Shuffle and a Xmas card…honestly this is the best Gift any vendor has ever given us.

Kudos, to the Agency Marketing group at Google for selecting such a great gift!

UPDATE: I just got home (from a long days work) naturally I decided to open the iPod, and noticed the new Shuffle from Google has a misprint engraving message. Google is “mispelled” in the engraving, it reads “ooGleg thanks you!” - how strange.

*Do you think this is a just a accident, coincidence or is it a hidden message.

1. The AdWords system not only visits pages specified in your destinations URLs, but could also follows any redirects to determine overall page relevancy from the site?
2. Spider visits from AdWords system do not appear as clicks or impressions, but they can improperly be counted by some third-party click trackers.
3. The AdWords system can be restricted by robots.txt instructions from visiting specific pages of the site (so please be prepared to experience many negative effects if you opt into these restrictions).
4. When defining the Quality Score for a particular Campaign, Google calculates content relevancy, site navigation ease, user information gathering and a multitude usage statistics.
5. AdWords systems visit and re-evaluate most advertiser site’s landing pages at least once a month.

Oops, seems like Digg.com is out of service today. Just tried to log in but the site is temporarily down for upgarde. I wonder, what will these new services announced be? Anyway, I thought there are some other ways for upgrading a site except for shutting it down for an unestimated period of time…

The new version of Ask.com local search AskCity was launched today! As a replacement of the previous local search engine – CitySearch, AskCity appears a considerable improvement to the system and contribution to the overall market share of Ask.com.

Starting from today on opening the Ask main page one can find an AskCity link on the right navigation bar which leads to the powerful local search engine with a bunch of handy functions to make the search as effective as possible.

Enjoy AskCity’s user-friendly interface, superb usability and a set of great AJAX features.

In case you’d like to dig into more details try AskCity PDF User Guide sent by Ask at SERoundTable.