Google: How to Provide Better Product Information

[engine]

Google has just published a document aimed at helping manufacturers, retailers, and publishers on how it better understands the products being sold, distributed, or published as part of, for example, a product review.

For brands and manufacturers this includes having unique Global Trade Item Numbers (GTINs), and not reusing GTINs, and following best practices.
For retailers and 3rd-party sellers it includes submitting quality structured data, provide GTINs (when they exist), and use valid and unique GTINs.
For Online Publishers they should use exact product names, structured data with GTINs when reviewing products, and again, use valid GTINs.

It's a document worth reading and bookmarking for reference.
[developers.google.com...]

[Robert Charlton]

Engine... thanks for this. Product coding, in my limited experience, has been one of the messiest and most confusing areas in ecommerce.

It's good to see Google attempting to provide some clarity, not only in product classifications, but also in distinctions for their use among, eg, manufacturers and resellers.


In the broader picture, Google appears to be tackling the chaos of identification... a lack of standardization which has been one of the major sticking points... not only in ecommerce, but... IMO... in the sharing of data (and data-based "tangibles") of all kinds.

I'm seeing this as a partial extension of the work pushed forward by John Giannandrea, the founder of Freebase, who came in to replace Google's Amit Singhal in 2016.

The Head Of Google Search, Amit Singhal Is Leaving The Company
Feb 2016
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4789368.htm [webmasterworld.com]

In that thread I posted about what I thought Giannandrea would bring to the company in the way of enhancing the knowledge graph. I have no inner pipeline to know exactly what he did at Google, but that does seem to be the direction he was going.

In the video I linked to, he notably said: "We are awash in un-reconciled data"... and I relate that comment to this emphasize on product information now.

Unfortunately, the linked video had major audio problems... but, with Google's automatic captioning, it is now much easier to follow and is well worth viewing. (I believe somewhere I've seen the same presentation with remastered audio, but can't find it now.)


As engine suggests, the product document is an essential reference.

[RedBar]

Wow G ... In your 23rd year and you have just decided to tell businesses how to do stuff eh?

Miss the bus you did!

[lammert]

Nothing new AFAIK. The information was already available in Merchant Center support [support.google.com], only in a little bit less readable format.

[engine]

Correct, lammert, it's not new, but many people don't have the complete picture, and this helps to bring it together.

[Robert Charlton]

I can tell you that small to large manufacturers and fabricators I've worked with did not have the complete picture, and on a number of sites I've worked on, this information would have been invaluable.

Additionally, there was a time, some years back, when in this forum, a group of us were asking questions related to this, and no one had any answers.

Though, say around 2013, eg, there was some information, in Google Product Feed for things like SKUs and UPC, if I remember correctly... there was no information I could find on whether or how these items might be used in optimizing a site... whether a reseller or fabricator could target, say, a manufacturer's SKU on its own site... etc etc.

I never did find a complete overview... the clients had no idea... and questions about who had the targeting rights, so to speak, for whose number were something I never did find out. Some reseller sales people, eg, thought that buyers might search by a manufacturer's SKU, which might be worthwhile on a very large order, but we ended up not proceeding in that direction, in part due to lack of information.

Might be of interest to me now, just as basic knowledge, albeit that particular group of projects is long gone. I haven't had time to explore this information enough see whether it would have helped, but this is a direction that I see will be in the future of a great many areas.

In the motion picture area, I saw firsthand what it takes to get standardization within, eg, 70mm large screen formats, cameras, and projection... and to encourage something analogous for all of ecommerce, which I believe Google would like to see happen and might try to encourage, would be a vast and ambitious project.

Ditto in something like public medicine, where Google dipped its toe with Project Flu, there are, too often, no standards at all for interchange of many kinds of data.... I believe that Google does have its sights on being a data search resource for all disciplines, so when I see something like this, I wonder how far Google will take it.

IMO, this product schema standardization might be very analogous to data interchange in scientific research of all kinds, and this kind of standardization is necessary for search.. (Just spinning my wheels, perhaps, but I think it can sometimes be productive to do that).

[RedBar]

Is Google trying to convince themselves or anyone else who may be listening / reading, that applicable national and international sttandards and formats have never existed and they are here to organise it?

Then WTF have I been working with for the past 53 years?

Honestly, if companies are having, or have had, problems with their industry's standard information then I seriously have to question their company's credibility!

[lammert]

My thoughts @RedBar. EAN codes (now called GTIN-13) have been in use since I was a small kid. All the production companies I have worked with since the early nineties have always produced their products with EAN registered numbers. Part of the world has been living under a rock it seems.