Brian Smith of Comparison Engines has a very indepth post about how he feels Google Base will break out of its shell in Q1 2007 and Google will use all of the tools at their disposal to take full advantage (and care of) their growing base of happy small and medium sized businesses which are currently using AdWords.
Google Base – The Comparison Shopping Story of Q1 2007
I predict that Google Base refinement options on Google will be rolled out over the next 2 months. Yes, we’ve been waiting for this to happen for a while…and there were signs that the implementation would take place last quarter. I don’t know what’s causing the delay, but if I were Google, I wouldn’t have made any major changes during the holiday season…so it just makes sense that changes will start to show up now. Also, Google has been much better about kicking out eBay affiliates which were spamming Base and shutting down duplicate accounts (to the dismay of many many etailers – especially b/c both accounts are basically de-activated at once).
Even though smart search marketers have been giddy over Google Base for a while and have been using Froogle effectively for a year or 2 or 3, adding a Google Base search refinement option to Google.com will dramatically increase the visibility of the service (I love my obvious statements). I estimate that there are currently about 30,000 merchants actively submitting feeds to Google Base. That number could easily double as search marketing firms wake up to the opportunity and companies like SingleFeed announce full support of Google Custom Attributes.
But it’s not just Google Base that will be the story, it’s Google’s steady march toward supremacy of small and medium size merchants. Ok, I guess Google already is a leader in servicing small and medium sized businesses (in my estimates, aprx. 125K merchants – not affiliates – currently use Adwords), but the web it’s weaving with Google.com, Adwords, Base, Checkout, and Analytics is pretty awesome.
