Google has rebranded their moribund shopping engine from Froogle to Google Product Search, and changed its look to match other Google pages.

Let’s be blunt: Getting your products listed in the shopping search engines is a tedious, cyclical, pain-in-the-butt process. But it’s also necessary if you want to get the most out of online retail. At the Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York, those in the know spill what they know about shopping search optimization.

Take a look at Google News U.S. and how many obscure foreign news sources are linked to. Of course nothing is wrong with this until you realize that the stories these sources are writing about are U.S. based. Looking deeper it’s obvious that some of  the news sites appear to be only writing about these stories in order to get traffic from Google News U.S..

I missed last week (My laptop started with the “laptop death rattle” – so it was a scramble to do data backups, find and migrate to a new machine). One of the worst parts of being a solo shop is being your own IT guy. Excuses aside – here’s twice the friday favorite goodness for this week.

In terms of traffic growth and market share, it’s just no contest. So many more people hit eBay’s options that Google’s Checkout and Base may as well be invisible.

When Microsoft is beating Google at something, it can’t be a good thing. As Hitwise analyst LeeAnn Prescott noted in her look at how Google Base and Checkout have fared since last summer against eBay and PayPal, Windows Live Expo has a larger market share than Google Base.

A couple of weeks ago, the Google Base team announced a change: it claimed that it was

With an ongoing lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice in the background, realtors have been under pressure to open their listings so online-only brokers can deliver them to prospective home buyers.

Google Base now has a podcast section, along with a special promo page asking podcasters to upload their casts to Base.

As it does this time every year, Google has sent out its holiday gifts for top earning AdSense publishers.

Froogle’s replacement, Google Base, has been missing in action from the Google search results, but some sleuthing may have turned up the elusive service.

If you enjoy talking about things like Flickr, Vizrea, YouTube, BlueDot, LinkedIn, WordPress, TypePad, MySpace, or if you’re someone involved in building such you probably would enjoy Chris Heuer’s new Social Media Club.

The homepage for Google Base received a mild makeover in order to improve its usability, particularly by bulk uploaders who can enhance its value by placing a lot of items in Base in one go.

Something new happened in mid-2006 – five out of the top ten websites listed by Alexa (based on traffic for the previous three months) were Asian. Four of those were Chinese.

Knowledge management is a concept, whereby, companies organize and present information to their customers regarding product usage.