Google Base Absorbs Froogle Feeds; Other Submission Systems Remain Independent

When I was at Google last this month, I got an update on
Google Base for a forthcoming article. One
of the things I was told was that Google Base was now the preferred way for
merchants to submit content to Froogle. Really? Then why was Google still
telling people on the Froogle site
still to submit Froogle feeds? That oversight has now been corrected. As Garett
Rogers notes, the feed
submission mechanism formerly in the
Google Merchant
Center has now been replaced with Google Base submissions. Garett also
highlights specific help pages about the change
here.
The consolidation is good, as Google Base is meant to be a central submission
point of all content for Google, as I’ve written
before (and
SEW members, see
also

this). However, that goal still remains far off.
Google Co-op,
Google Sitemaps,
Google Book
Search and
Google
Scholar all remain independent ways to submit content of various types
independently of Google Base, as the links for those services explain. I’ll come
back to this issue in more depth, in the future.