So what's up with Froogle?

20:48.13 - Monday 21st March 2005   (Link to This Entry)

AAAARGH!

About a month ago I applied to put one of my websites onto Froogle, thinking it would help them to sell more stuff. I created a php script to spit out the list of products (over 2000 of them) and followed all of the instructions for uploading it to Google's servers - so far no problem.

Then the wait. And waaaait... and waaaaaaaaiiitt..... Zzzzzzz....

After a week of this I finally get an error on my Froogle feed back - seems I forgot a single underscore character in the first field name and - of course! - the whole thing ground to a halt. Considerinf Google Labs has some of the brightest people on the planet working on its code, I'm suprised they couldn't figure out a way around this one.

So I fix it and re-upload the entire file, and I wait another week for it to run through the first scan successfully. "Great!" thinks I, "they'll be online now!" Sadly not - Google then took another two weeks to approve my feed. Hey, not a problem though, right? It's a legit company and a legit product list, so there's not problem, right? Right?

Wr-ong! Because Froogle/Google/Sloowgle took so long to get the frickin' thing approved and active, the damned product feed has expired. Even funnier (!), it expired on the very day they finally sent it live. Sob!

So I've generated another feed and uploaded it. If any funny f*cker at Froogle thinks I actually enjoy this sh*t, please think again. And while we're at it, why can't I just specify a link to my script that you can call once a fortnight or something? That would be a whole lot easier than fannying about creating a script, saving it out to my desktop and they FTPing the damned thing to your machine, only for it to sit there for a week before you get round to looking at it.

GAH! I say GAH!