All you ever wanted to know about Google Base but were afraid to ask

You may have heard of Google Base, a beta product we launched a few months ago which allows content owners to easily make their information searchable online. Well, to provide you the most up to date and accurate info, we recently caught up with Denise from the Google Base team:

What's Google Base?

Google Base is an extension of Google's existing content collection efforts like the web crawl, Google Sitemaps, Google Book Search, and Google Video. It's a place where you can post all sorts of information and have it show up on Google.com and other relevant properties like Froogle and Google Local for free.

The goal of Google Base is to improve the overall quality and breadth of Google Search results by collecting an even wider diversity of content. Allowing content owners to describe and assign attributes to the information they submit will help us use this meta-data to better target search results to what users are looking for.

So how might an AdWords advertiser use it?

Google Base can direct traffic to specific URLs on your own websites for free! It complements Google AdWords by driving additional traffic to your sites from another Google property. Though you can't control the rank of your site in the search results, Google Base allows you to help decide how people find you -- you can add relevant item details and define your own keywords to help others find your stuff more easily.

Can content owners submit lots of information at once?

We make it easy for you to post lots of items at once through feeds or bulk uploads in tab-delimited, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom formats. In addition, you can create custom attributes in your bulk upload files. Attributes, or item details, are words or phrases that help describe the characteristics or qualities of your items. For example, if you're trying to describe a recipe you want to share, you might include attributes such as 'Cuisine: French', 'Main Ingredient: Eggs', and 'Course: Breakfast'. You can also add images in JPEG and GIF formats.

What's new with Google Base since its initial launch?

Since its launch, Google Base has proven useful for both personal and business use. People have uploaded their favorite recipes, podcast links, events, personal profiles, clinical trial information, and even protein databases. And, as expected, a subset of Google Base items have been listed for sale. To improve the user experience for these item types, we're planning to start letting people buy Google Base commercial items using their Google Accounts.

Many of you may already use your Google Account to sign in and pay for a number of Google services, like Google Video and Google Earth. Now we're introducing similar functionality for Google Base: buyers will have a convenient and secure way to purchase Google Base items by credit card, and sellers can take advantage of easy to use transaction processing as they manage their Google Base items. We're starting off with a very small number of sellers, and we expect to include more over the next several months. If you're interested in getting an announcement when this feature is generally available, let us know.

By providing buyers and sellers a convenient and secure way to purchase and sell Google Base items, we hope to make it even easier for people to use Google Base to post and distribute a wide range of content, from details about a family reunion to a used bike for sale.

Posted by Arielle, Inside AdWords crew