No Guns at Google Shopping

broblues

broblues

planning and plotting
Joined
Oct 27, 2010
Messages
2,077
Location
Indiana
So, I guess Google decided to disallow gun sale information from it's site. You can still look at pictures of a handgun, but if you use the shopping feature.....nothing. Wow.
 
No cigars, either.....

Edited to add - fresh off Google's site - List of banned / restricted product catagories:

Affiliates, cataloged drop-shipping programs, and multi-level marketing


The promotion of affiliate or pay-per-click links, products sold through a commission-based relationship, or sites that bulk list products fulfilled through drop-ship consolidators is not allowed. This includes item pages that are made up almost entirely of advertisements, or pages where advertisements obstruct the view of the submitted product. The promotion of multi-level marketing (MLM) business products is also not permitted, such as businesses that recruit members and offer them rewards for recruiting others and/or selling services
Services

Services are not allowed on Google Shopping.

Examples of listings disallowed:
  • Event tickets
  • Subscriptions, such as magazine subscriptions or any kind of service subscription.
  • Online courses
Other prohibited categories

The following products are not allowed on Google Shopping:
  • Vehicles
  • Guns, ammunition and knives
  • Tobacco and cigarettes
  • Traffic devices (Learn more)
  • Products related to casino and gambling
  • Products or digital goods that require additional software installation in order to be purchased.
  • Products bundled with service plans. (Note: The only products that are allowed to be submitted with a service plan are mobile devices.)
 
Google is making major changes to their shopping engine. If you were a business, you could list your products for free in the shopping engine. Not anymore; they now charge a PPC fee just like adwords. They're trying to weed out a lot of the not so serious businesses. Too bad about their ban on tobacco.
 
Rod said:
Google is making major changes to their shopping engine. If you were a business, you could list your products for free in the shopping engine. Not anymore; they now charge a PPC fee just like adwords. They're trying to weed out a lot of the not so serious businesses. Too bad about their ban on tobacco.
Click to expand...
Will that effect your visability as a blog?
 
No. It only affects companies who sell products that are listed on Google Shopping. They now have to pay for their product feed.
 
Yeah, it's Google shopping, not Google search. You can still go to a vendor's website via Google and buy stuff. I suspect given the wide variance of state by state laws, taxes, and regulations on most everything on that list, they (or their legal dept.) decided it was just easier to say "the hell with it."

~Boar
 
Posted this on Facebook a few days ago. I never used the shopping feature, but if they want to censor out certain things, that's their choice. But, it'salso my choice to drop all things google - Gmail, Youtube, Picasa and so on. I've migrated away from them and never happier. Look into their privacy rules, and their ideas on sharing data among all their services... all the reason I needed to leave.
 
I don't see this necessarily as a bad thing. Google shopping would give you so many bogus hits and shady, fly-by-night sites that it was nearly worthless as a shopping tool.

While I hate some of the exclusions, I hope that in general, they can improve the service and provide accurate pricing/items/shipping costs from reputable sellers.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top