December 10th, 2006
Google Base update: Rate items and new interface
When "searching" on Google Base, you still see the old version of results, but browsing through items (by clicking a category on the main page) displays a newly designed results page that includes a "Map View". This is the same thing I discovered on October 29th after snooping through Google's robots.txt file.
That's not the only new feature though — now you can rate any Google Base item out of five stars and leave comments for other people to read. The only person (other than myself and Nate) who have commented on anything is "Karthik" — one of the Google Base engineers.
"In response to the issues that our testers uncovered, the Base engineers — Karthik and Deepak — and I built new designs" — Official Google Base Blog
Something I have to bring up is the speed of the new results. At least for me, it's quite slow — using the dropdown items to narrow products is very frustrating. Could this be the result of them using Google Web Toolkit to design this part of Google Base? Looking at the source code gives us a clear indication that is what they did, but is it the source of my problems?
<script language="javascript" xsrc="gwt.68.js"></script>
<iframe id="__gwt_historyFrame" style="width:0;height:0;border:0"></iframe>
Overall, with my speed beef aside (because I'm not sure everyone has the same problem), I am happy with the new interface. What do you think? With these changes, will you use Google Base more often than you currently use Froogle now?
Garett Rogers is employed as a programmer for iQmetrix, which specializes in retail management software for the wireless industry.
See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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