What's the probability? My Gite advert on 4OD

I have recently taken out an advert on Holiday Lettings.co.uk for our farmhouse rental near Josselin, and much to my surprise today I saw a banner advert for our Gite!

I was viewing the Channel 4 TV 'catchup' service 4OD, to try to watch an episode of Time Team that my father recommended to me as they were digging in York, which is where I went to University (an awful long time ago).

And there, in the banner advert at the top of the 4OD website was an advert for Holiday Lettings, with links to two of their Brittany properties, including on the right, my own holiday Gite.

I was at first incredibly surprised at the probability of being served an advert for holiday lettings, and then for there to be two featured properties that included my own. After a while I figured that it was probably the cleverness of Google Advertising that had worked out that I have sometimes searched on Google for Brittany holiday Gite's, and that this was thus a good advert to serve to me. However having refreshed the 4OD page several times since I've been shown adverts for Aviva Insurance, Audible spoken word books, Thomson Holidays and now Marc Jacobs fragrances, so I am not convinced it was clever Google after all.

Here's my full browser window, showing the advert in context:

Well let's hope the bookings come rolling in !

Some insight from Google as to how they understand languages and synonyms

Just read a very interesting post on Google's official blog describing how Google search engine understands language synonyms.

I won't repeat the article here, but to give a flavour as to what the post is about (so you can take a view on whether you find this interesting or not), Google understands the context of what you're searching for to understand that:
      a search for gm cars turns up results for General Motors

whereas:
      a search for gm wheat turns up results for Genetically Modified Wheat

and:
      navy gm focusses on a Navy Gunner's Mate.

And remember of course that all this linguistic cleverness is done in more than 100 languages that are supported by Google.

Clever stuff these computers ...

Google BrowserSize - Making it easier to see how others view your website

Last night Google announced on their Blog the launch of Google BrowserSize which was developed as a "20% time" project my employees of Google and has now been publicly launched in GoogleLabs.

The idea behind Google BrowserSize is quite simple, and reflects the importance of having the most important text on your webpage at the top-left hand corner.

Using a sample of browsers sizes from real users of Google.com, Google BrowserSize overlays onto your website a series of coloured zones to show what percentage of users would be able to see that part of your website.

So if for instance you've got some important text or action button that's part way down the page or across to the right hand side then you can see just how many users would have to scroll their browser to see the 'important' bit. Obviously most people will read and act upon the text immediately in front of them when they view your website so if you're relying on them having to scroll to read and act upon your website then you're going to lose impact and potentially of course loose customers.

Here's how BrowserSize looks on my own rental holiday cottage website:

lines it enables you to graphically see representation of how many different web your website looks when viewed

One of the things that is immediately apparent is that because of all the hard work I put in when redesigning the website back in 2006 to ensure that the text automatically flows out to fill the full browser width, it means that even with quite small browser widths (e.g. set to 900 pixels to match a 90% browser coverage of actual Google users) the page is still quite readable.

And in the other direction, with the page width set to the same 900px, I can see that a good half of the navigation menu is straight away visible for everyone (i.e. in the '99%' zone), and the remaining navigation items ('Contact Us', 'Site Map', 'GuestBook Comments', etc) are in the 98-90% zone - i.e. 9 out of 10 people can see the whole navigation menu without having to scroll the browser at all.

And in the middle of the screen I've got my "Stop Press" late breaking news box, and then the main introduction to the holiday Gite starts.

So all in all I'm pretty happy with the results, shows that most of the time the key information I want people to see is visible without requiring scrolling.

But what this has got me thinking though is that I ought to resequence some of the menu navigation items to promote a few of the more important ones up higher on the page. 'Contact Us' is currently in the 95% zone - meaning 5% of website visitors would have to scroll to see it - and I can easily move this up and move 'Rental Rates' down.

In conclusion, another useful WebMaster tool from Google.

"Checking out" Google Checkout (and Paypal) transaction fee structures for card payments

Google Checkout

A few weeks ago I wrote about how Google Checkout had re-instated my seller account after they'd changed the rules about what was allowed to be sold and included timeshare and holiday rental properties.

Since then I've finally had a chance to look at the fees charged by Google Checkout to compare them to other electronic card payment mechanisms.

When Google Checkout launched in the UK the fees were a very reasonable flat rate of 15p handling fee plus 1.5% of the transaction amount.

Then in March 2009 Google Checkout revised the fee structure to a tiered structure, and depending upon your monthly revenue through Google checkout you pay a lower fee rate:

Monthly Sales Through Google Checkout	Fees Per Transaction
Less than £1500	3.4% + £0.20
£1500 - £5999.99	2.9% + £0.20
£6000 - £14999.99	2.4% + £0.20
£15000 - £54999.99	1.9% + £0.20
£55000 or more	1.4% + £0.20

So unfortunately a rather substantial increase unless you're already doing serious business with Google checkout.

How does this stack up against the competition? Well the lead alternative contender for taking credit card payments is of course Paypal and the Paypal transaction fee structure is amazingly absolutely the same as Google Checkout.
(Well it's not quite the same as Google Checkout, there's 1p difference on each transaction band, so it's 3.4% + 20p for transactions valued from £0.00 to £1500.00, then 2.9% +20p from £1500.01, etc, but I'm not quibbling over this 1p difference!)

So in this age of the internet driving an open marketplace and price transparency with the smaller, newer and nimbler players being able to compete on a level playing field with the established big boys, it's surprising to see that these two companies have decided to price exactly the same as each other.

Where Paypal does come out cheaper is cross-border card payment transactions (e.g. an American guest pays to stay in the Gite), the Paypal fee is then an additional 0.5% higher whereas Google Checkout add on a full 1%. A small but noticeable difference.

So although I've now re-instated Google Checkout on the rental rates page as a method for guests to pay for their French holiday, if truth be told I'd actually prefer that our guests didn't pay by credit card because I lose such a large chunk in commission.

Given the choice I ask guests if they can send me their holiday booking deposit and the final rental payment by cheque, and it's simply because then I end up with the full rental amount in my bank account and don't give away a chunk to an intermediary. Pretty much all our guests do pay by cheque, the exception being those that book our Gite direct from VillaRentals (aka RentalSystems) to whom I have to pay a 10% commission.

Of course for guests coming from overseas countries (and over the years we've had guests from Ireland, Sweden, Holland, the USA and Australia) it's not practical for them to pay by cheque so I generally ask them to book and pay for their holiday via RentalSystems, and as RentalSystems treat the transaction as a referral from me I pay just 2% commission - saving me roughly 2% over Paypal.

As well as Paypal, RentalSystems and now Google Checkout, we also can take debit/credit card payments from Nochex.co.uk (who charge 2.9% + 20p) or MoneyBookers.com (1.9% fee for transferring money from a credit card).

As a "small business" there seems to be a plethora of card provider options out there but with some high fees to match. For now both us and our customers have been quite happy with cheque payment and whilst we do offer all these card payment options we're never asked "how do I pay by credit card?".

What's your view - would you expect to pay by credit card or are cheques OK, and are there any cheaper payment engines that come recommended (and are easy for customers to use)?

Just how big is Brittany Ferries website?

I came across a rather odd article the other day that announced that as a result of implementing some website optimisation software, Brittany Ferries website had leapt from having 3,000 webpages indexed by Google to 308,000 pages being indexed by the search engine.

I have to admit I was astonished by this marketing claim. Just how big is Brittany Ferries website? I can't imagine how they can possibly have three hundred thousand unique pages of website content even if they include affiliated organisations such as their Brittany Ferries Gites & Cottages directory. A thousand or so maybe but that's an absolutely incredible amount of material.

So I did a few searches for myself.

Self SEO have a tool that will search the major search engines and tell you how many pages you have indexed on the search engines.

For BrittanyFerries.com SelfSEO reported 14 indexed pages, but for Brittany-Ferries.co.uk it reported 346,000 pages as being indexed!

Alternatively in the Google search box you can type the query

          "inurl:putyourdomainnamehere.com site:putyourdomainnamehere.com -qwertrew"

where "qwertrew" is some term that does NOT appear on any of your pages.

Try this for www.brittany-ferries.co.uk and then click on the 'repeat the search with the omitted results included' and I got 42,300 pages but if you dig down then an awful lot of the pages seem awfully similar to each other.

So it's odd that the numbers can be so wildly different depending on how you 'ask' Google what it's indexed.

So repeating these queries on something I know the answer to, my very own www.giteinbrittany.com vacation rental website.

SelfSEO revealed 119 pages indexed, and via the 'inurl' Google search trick, 118 pages indexed.

Digging around and counting up I found that there are 27 actual pages of content (Gite description, places to visit, travel directions, current availability) on the Gite website, 74 availability calendar pages (one for each month from January 2005 through to January 2011), 14 different 'test' pages I've written whilst trying out ideas (like the website redesign of 2006) and 5 different PDF documents (booking enquiry form, etc).

So the 'correct' answer is somewhere around 120 if you add all these together - thus the SelfSEO number seems just about on the mark.

Which leads me back to sort of trusting the website index statistics unearthed by SelfSEO, and thus begs the question I started off with, Just how does Brittany Ferries end up with so many unique website pages?

It's taken me long enough to write a hundred or so pages !

Every search is a quest. Every quest is a story - Google search videos

Under the title "Cool, Even Batman uses Google" last week Google also announced a short series of video's about using Google search to solve everyday problems.

As well as Batman using Google there's a resident working to fix local potholes that runs for local election, a grandma starting to use YouTube, an American High School student trying to fit in to a new school, and more. Altogether there's 6 different search story videos under the "Every search is a quest. Every quest is a story" theme but I must warn you that they're all ultra-smultzchy.

My favourite is the Paris love video:



Don't say I didn't warn you !

They are good though ...

First look at Google Chromium - the shape of personal computing to come?

Last week on Google's official Blog was the open source launch of Chromium OS, Google's operating system.

Like many Google announcements it's been lept on by some industry speculators and is being touted as a future Microsoft "killer" - despite this being a very early version that won't be properly available to consumers for another year.

So what's it really like?

Over on Computer Weekly there's a good photo review of Chromium OS which takes you through the main features of the forthcoming operating system. In essence it's a locked-down linux-like operating system that appears to the user as just a web browser so you can "only" browse websites and run web apps (such as Google Mail, Google Docs). In a nod to other dominant internet standards a Flash player is bundled in, but you won't be able to install any of your own apps at all.

In use there's clearly a long way to go before Google perfect the user interface but judging by other Google endeavours this'll only be a matter of time, but the reviewers at CW commented on the lightning fast (20 second) startup time and responsiveness. Designed for the next generation of internet-connected devices I was a bit disappointed to learn that Google plan to only make it available on new devices so it won't be a PC or Mac replacement Operating System .... but given that it's all going to be open source'd then maybe this'll change?

For more details see the home of the Chromium projects where you can subscribe to email updates, or read the Chromium Blog, or you can even download and build your own copy of Chromium OS and buy the developer hardware.

What do you think? An Internet flash-in-the-pan or the next-big-thing? Personally I think with Google's backing it should do well, but big companies (like Microsoft) have gone awry on the Internet before so who knows for sure?

Google Translate gets better

Google announced three new features on Google Translate today that will make it even easier to bring the international internet to the masses.

As well as being able to cut and paste in a paragraph of text or a web page to have it translated, Google Translate now offers:

• Instant translation - as you type in one language the text is instantly converted.
• Read and write any language by having your text converted to phonetics.
• Text-to-speech - listen to the English conversion of what you've just typed.

My broadband connection is a bit dodgy some mornings so I found the 'instant translation' was quite jerky and didn't always convert what I'd written, and the text-to-speech didn't work at all; but I'm sure these are problems at my end rather than of Google's making.

Alternatively I'm still using the Translate Button I wrote about in March 2007 - select a paragraph of foreign text, click the bookmark button, and you're instantly dropped into a Google translation of the selected text.

Google Checkout lets us back in - we've been approved again!

Google Checkout - Content Policies

Reader of my blog from 2 years ago will 'of course' remember the spat I had at the time with Google Checkout which resulted in them suspending my merchant account.

Saying it like that sounds far more grand an event than it actually was, so perhaps I'd better back-track a little and recount the story a little ...

Google checkout launched in the UK in early 2007 (as a competitor to paypal and other e-payment vehicles). I thought they'd be a good alternative way for guests to pay for their rental of our holiday home and so I registered and was approved for a merchant account. Then just as I was about to launch Google Checkout on our Gite website I was informed by Google that my Google Checkout account was being suspended because I had contravened their selling policies, and that selling Travel and Travel related packages was not allowed. I wrote to Google to appeal this decision but was told that Google Checkout determines its policies by focussing on providing a positive user experience, and that they had sole discretion in setting and exercising these policies.

And that was that. After my grumpy Blog postings I removed Google Checkout from the payment options and forgot about them.

So I was somewhat surprised to receive an email from Google a couple of weeks ago:

Subject: You Google Checkout account is now active
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:12:52 -0000
From: Google Checkout Team

Hello Geoffrey,

In our continuing effort to make Google Checkout more useful to our users, we review our policies on a regular basis to keep them current and effective.

I am pleased to inform you that we have revised our content policies. Going forward, we will be allowing the sale of Vacation Rentals, Timeshares, and Sight-seeing tours through Google Checkout.

As a result, you are now eligible to use Google Checkout to process transactions for these products and services as permitted by the revised policy. We have therefore reinstated your Google Checkout merchant account.

Please visit http://checkout.google.com/support/sell/bin/answer.py?answer=75724 for more information on our revised policy.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Please feel free to reply to this email if you have any additional questions.

Sincerely,

Pavani
The Google Checkout Team

Looking on the Google Checkout link to their content policies didn't really tell me much more, it still says that 'Travel packages and offers' are not allowed, and more specifically that Google Checkout doesn't allow the sale of "Travel services, including hotel, flight, cruise and car reservations; travel clubs". Looking back and very carefully comparing against the original Blog entries I wrote I eventually spotted that "Timeshare properties" was removed from the end of dis-allowed sale items. I wish they'd made it a bit clearer as to what is allowed as by not allowing the sale of 'Travel packages and offers' I initially was very confused.

There is also a posting on Google Checkout's Blog about the new Update to checkout policies which repeats much of the email I received but additionally states that sellers must have a valid public business URL (i.e. website) - so not a problem for us with www.giteinbrittany.com.

I'll have to go and do some comparison of the credit card fee structures that Google Checkout charge compared to other providers we use today. I prefer to take rental payment by cheque as it doesn't cost us any merchant fees that way (and most customers seem to be quite happy with sending us a cheque), but we do accept card payments if the customer asks, and especially for overseas customers such as from Ireland it's usually the easier.

Google Wave launched - with the potential to replace email, blogging and more

Google Wave

Last week Google announced at their 'Google IO' developers conference something I'm sure we're going to be hearing a lot more over the next year, Google Wave.

How do I describe Google Wave?

It's basically a reinvention of how to electronically interact with other people and documents, done afresh from the ground up. It combines collaboration tools and document sharing and editing in what could well be the replacement for email, twittering, blogging, wiki's, teamsites, instant messaging and many other forms of disjointed communication.

You have to go and watch the Google Wave launch video, and although it runs to an hour and twenty minutes you'll soon realise why this could be the "next big thing".



Google have apparently been working on this for the last two years, and although the software is still in a pre-beta state it's still a fairly impressive demo.

Google say they will launch Google Wave later on this year but the Wave APIs and interface protocol have already been made freely available under an open source licence.

One to watch methinks ...

(and I'm not the only one to think this, I just noticed that there's already 3,200 RSS subscribers to the Google Wave Developer Blog)

UK Traffic Conditions now on Google Maps

Traffic details on Google Maps

I noticed the other day that Google Maps have now started showing traffic details for most of the UK motorway network - simply click on the "Traffic" button on the top right above the map and you're shown live traffic details with normal traffic flow showing up in Green then changing to Yellow, Red and finally Black as the conditions worsen.

But there's more !

Clicking on the 'change' link next to the traffic speed legend and you're able to see historic average journey speeds for any day of the week or time period. With this you can easily see when the car parking opens on the M25 or the M6 snarls up past Birmingham, and it seems to be fairly accurate, my daily commute to Stockley Park is shown as getting difficult from about 6:30am, and is stop-start all the way round from 7:15am. Yep, I've been there a few times!

So far almost all of the UK Motorway (and Motorway grade A roads) are included and long stretches of a number of main A roads are covered as well (e.g. A1, A421, A43, A14), but there are still a few inexplicable gaps (e.g. there is a 1 mile gap on the M25 next to Abbots Langley).

Whilst I'm on the subject of traffic news I should mention Keep Moving which (once you've enrolled for free) you can setup your regular journeys (home to work, work to home, home to in-laws, etc) and then at a glance see what the journey time is likely to be and if there are any holdups on your route. You can get free texts sent to your phone or daily summary reports sent by email - I receive a morning text at 7am before I get stuck on the M25 and an email at 5pm before I attempt the journey home.

Keep Moving has a number of other features but they're not all that well integrated together on the website. There's CCTV images from the Highways Agency so you can check for yourself where the holdups are, eye witness traffic reports from other motorists, cheap fuel locations along your route and cheap food (from supermarkets) instead of being ripped off at a service station.

Some of these features can be a bit frustrating to use as once you've looked at the doom and gloom of the traffic holdups on your journey home you then have to separately search by road name if you want to look at the live CCTV images - so much better if they were available on the same map, but the data seems to be good and hopefully these usability things will improve with time.

Final mention goes to Route Scanner which mashes up Google Maps with live traffic information from the BBC Travel and Highways Agency. The Route Scanner search engine seems to be quite temperamental, it took several attempts for me to get details for my typical commute; I only got through when I entered details of nearby large towns on my route - post-code entry and both my home village were not accepted.

Blogging in the future

When I finished editing my last posting about a scam "honeymoon" booking I accidentally discovered a new feature that Blogger had just introduced - automatic future posting.

When I finished writing the article on Tuesday evening I decided I'd post it on Wednesday morning when I got into work so I changed the post date & time to 9am on Wednesday morning. I then intended to click "save now" to save a draft copy of the posting, and then on Wednesday morning I'd click on "publish post" to launch my inner thoughts onto the internet (well a few of my inner thoughts anyway).

Instead what I did was press the enter key, which defaults to "publish post" and Blogger then surprised me with the following screen telling me that my posting was queued up and would be automatically posted at the appropriate date in the future:

Blogger only launched the automatic posting of future-dated posts last month, and like lots of things from Google it's delivered so neatly that you don't even need to search it out - it just works!

Guess what, I'm going to future-date this posting as well, not for any good reason, just because I can !!

Nice to get a cheque *from* Google

Google Adwords

Last month I wrote about Google Adwords offering me a VAT refund and today in the post I received a nice cheque for £67.90 for VAT overcharged between 1st January 2004 and 22nd May 2008.

I didn't think I really used Adwords all that much (perhaps a tenner or so a month in advertising fees) but it clearly adds up as shown by the size of the refund cheque.

Unfortunately there was no multi-coloured Google logo on the cheque or a curvy 'g' like Google's new favicon just a plain "Google Ireland Ltd" typed out on the top.

Oh well off to the bank tomorrow to pay it in along with a couple of Gite rental cheques that have come in. We ask for a 25% deposit up front to secure the booking, then the balance payment 8 weeks before the booking. So now there's a nice little deluge of cheques arriving with all our guests paying for their July and August holidays.

All helps the "Gite renovation" fund!

New 'favicon' Icon for Google - and what is Favicon anyway?

I think I need to get out more !

Yesterday I noticed that Google has gone and got itself a new 'favicon' icon, a rather stylish blue 'g' rather than a Capital 'G' in a white box.

By now I'm sure half of my readers will have switched off and the other half will have decided I've gone bonkers. For those of you left, a quick side explanation about favicon's ....

Favicon (short for Favourite Icon) was pioneered by Internet Explorer 5 and for once this proprietary Microsoft extension has now become common across most other web browsers.

If you define a simple 16 by 16 Windows icon (or logo) for your own website, name it favicon.ico, and then install it on the root directory of your website, when someone bookmarks your website your icon then appears alongside the browser bookmark to remind a visitor about your site, as your link in their favourites will then stand out.

Firefox then extended the use of favicon by displaying the website icon in the browser address bar and on the tab window so it's instantly visible what website you are looking at, and now IE7 has copied this design feature as well.

I've had it on my "to-do" list for some time to get around to defining my own website favicon, but somehow I've still not quite managed to do so. You need a graphics program that will output Icon format files such as Paint Shop Pro or Icon Forge, or there's a simple online favicon editor over at degraeve.com and a favicon generator on favicon.co.uk that takes a .GIF or .BMP picture and converts it to .ICO format.

The picture above shows some of the open tabs from my current Firefox session; the orange B is Blogger, the blue G in a green box is the original Google icon, next to it is ebay and on the row below is AngloInfo, a website which doesn't have a favicon setup (so shows the default white box) and then three of the new curly 'g' google icons.

It appears that Google's not yet rolled the new icon around all of its websites, google.com and google.co.uk have both been changed as has Google Analytics and Google Maps, but Google Adwords is still the old fashioned square-box G icon.

And I've beaten the Googling Google blog to this news. Like I said, I need to get out more ...

Due a VAT refund from Google Adwords

Google Adwords

A couple of weeks ago I received an email from Google Adwords telling me that they'd reviewed by Google Adwords account and decided that my VAT setting was incorrect as my account was being used for business purposes (i.e. I was using Adwords to "gain an economic advantage by promoting goods or services on Google AdWords") rather than non-business purposes.

According to Google I had either declared that my adwords account was being used for non-business purposes (unlikely) or that I had not entered a VAT number (definitely the case as I'm not VAT registered). As a result of this VAT was being charged on my Google Adwords Adverts at the Irish rate (21%) as all EU customers are managed from Google Ireland Ltd (EU).

The email then went on to explain that under article 194 of European Council Directive 2006/112/EC as a non-Irish resident business I should be responsible for accounting for VAT in my home country, and thus Adwords have ceased charging me Irish VAT on my Adwords adverts.

Finally the email concluded with telling me that I may be eligible for a refund of Irish VAT charged by Google Ireland Ltd that I had errantly paid.

Digging into the Adwords help files I found a definition of whether Adwords is being used for business purposes or not, whether VAT applies to Adwords or not which also said that "Advertisers with a business address in the EU, but outside Ireland, may self-assess VAT at their Member State's local rate if they are using Google AdWords for business purposes", and finally instructions on how to declare for self assessment of VAT within Google Adwords.

I did find this all somewhat confusing as there's no easy way of making a VAT self-declaration in the UK as my rental income turnover is considerably below the annual VAT threshold.

Potential eligibility for a VAT refund was triggered by me checking my VAT details on my Adwords account and basically confirming that the account's 'company name' matched the name held on my bank account as this is who any refund cheque would be made payable to.

Well not really expecting much from it I duly verified my company name details and today was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from Google Adwords telling me that I am eligible for a refund of past VAT charged by Google Ireland to the tune of £67.90.

Very nice!

OnOneMap - a great Google mashup if you're looking to buy a house

OnOneMap

Here's a great site that I came across recently if you're looking for a new home, it's a mashup of Google maps with estate agency data to show you all* the houses for sale in a selected area.

It's really been well implemented with lots of Ajax popups, you can zoom in and out and pan the map, restrict the houses shown according to number of bedrooms, price, etc; show overlays of mobile phone masts, supermarkets, secondary schools and (as at about a week ago) flood plain information.

One of the really neat features I like is that at any page you can subscribe to an RSS feed (see earlier explanation I wrote on 'what is RSS and how can I use it') of all properties on your current map page and price range. So here for example is a view of properties for sale in our home village of Wrestlingworth and here's the corresponding RSS feed.

I only have a couple of minor gripes that the mobile phone database seems a bit patchy (there's a mast on the edge of our village that's not shown) and that there seems to be a problem with secondary schools not being displayed in Bedfordshire (which is probably due to Bedfordshire having a 3-tier infant/middle/senior school system not the normal 2-tier arrangement).

* Although I say "all properties" in your area for sale, in reality there's some time lag as to when properties appear on the site.
Running the same address search for properties for sale in my village on the better known rightmove.co.uk I found two more properties that haven't appeared on ononemap, and conversely one on onemap that wasn't on rightmove - so pays your money, take your choice I guess.

Unfortunately ononemap doesn't yet show overseas houses so you can't use it to look for your 'dream home in the sun' !

---

Categories: CoolWebsites, Google, Map, Web2

Google Checkout's refusal for my business

Google Checkout

Further to my earlier post about being suspended from Google Checkout because I'm selling travel products, we've swapped reasons as to why I have been suspended ("in breach of their content policies" - which I knew) and I've tried to get to the bottom of why selling travel products (in my particular case, rent of my holiday home) is a banned item.

I pointed out that many of the items banned from Google Checkout are either illegal, immoral or otherwise of questionable value (drugs, fake passports, alcohol, adult materials, wonder miracle drugs, guns, etc), none of which I had a problem with, but that I could not understand why Google would classify travel products in the same way.

Today I received a reply back from them in response to my probing:

Hello Geoffrey,

Thank you for your email. I understand you would like to know why Google does not allow sale of travel products and services through Google Checkout.

I would like to inform you that when we develop our program policies, we focus on providing a positive user experience while adhering to various legal considerations. These policies are formulated to ensure overall program quality and a positive user experience for everyone, whether they are buyers or sellers.

While formulating our content policies, we take into consideration different factors like the buyer's user experience, chargeback risk (for both buyers and sellers), associated with the product or service that is being sold through Google Checkout, and the like. Our goal is to create fair, consistent, and adaptable policies.

As mentioned in my earlier email communication to you, Google reserves the right to expand or edit these policies at any time. Google will also exercise its sole discretion in the interpretation and enforcement of these policies in conjunction with the program's Terms of Service.

Please feel free to reply to this email if you have any additional questions.

Sincerely,

XYZ
The Google Checkout Team

So there you have it, an explanation (of sorts) for the suspension decision.

Google Checkout either thinks that taking payment for renting our french holiday home is illegal, it could result in a "negative buying experience", or it could result in a higher risk of charge backs.

Other payment mechanisms (rentalsystems, paypal, ownersdirect, gitesdefrance, etc) don't seem to perceive these concerns, but Google obviously does; and as they're judge, jury and executioner on any policy decisions, there's little I more I can do but reluctantly accept their decision.

Google Checkout opens for business in the UK (but not for me)

Google Checkout

About a month ago Google announced the launch of Google Checkout in the UK and as a special offer (to drum up business no doubt) for sellers they would waive all card handling fees (normally 4%) up to the end of 2007, and for all purchases of £30 or more, they'd give all purchasers an automatic £10 reduction.

Having a quick look round the Google checkout fees and benefits I thought it was a worthwhile alternative to paypal et all as a payment method for taking rental payments for our French holiday home and so I successfully registered for a sellers account.

A couple of the features I liked were being able to have a Google checkout cart on my Google adwords adverts (hopefully drive through a few more customers) and that I'd get a discount on my checkout fees as a result of advertising on adwords. The credit card handling fees that paypal charge are IMHO quite extortionate and I was quite looking forward to being able to offer a more reasonably priced alternative that Google Checkout would offer me.

Since then I've been working on some new pages for the site advertising the benefits of Google Checkout, hoping to encourage some early 2008 bookings by means of the £10 saving.

Everything was finished and I was going to launch the additional site pages on the weekend but didn't quite get round to it for a day or so.

Today when I downloaded my emails I found all my effort was in vain as Google Checkout have suspended my sellers account as my (holiday home) site "contravenes their content policies":

Hello Geoffrey,

During our recent review, we found that one or more products or services on your website (http://www.giteinbrittany.com) appear to violate the following Google Checkout content policies:

- Restricted product category: Travel and travel related Services

You may use Google Checkout for any other products or services which do not violate our policies. Currently, however, it appears that all your products or services on your website violate our policies. As a result, your account has been suspended. You may not process any orders at this time. If applicable, any pending orders in your account have been cancelled.

Your final payment will be initiated within two business days. However, your bank may take up to three additional business days to register the payment in your bank account.

If you choose to use Google Checkout for other products or services in compliance with our policies, please let us know so that we can review the status of your account.

For general product or account questions, please review our Help Centre at https://checkout.google.com/support/?hl=en_GB. Alternatively, please do not hesitate to contact me by replying to this email.

Kind regards,

XYZ
The Google Checkout Team

On searching Google Checkout's policies in detail (and it wasn't at all obvious), I finally found the appropriate page that describes what's allowed and what's not allowed to be sold via Google Checkout.

Google have quite a comprehensive list of things you're not allowed to sell via Google Checkout, many of which are illegal or of questionable morality such as Adult goods, Alcohol, Body parts, Copyrighted software, Endangered species, Drugs, Passports, etc - all of which I have absolutely no problem with at all and personally I'm quite glad that Google does prevent their sale; and then just about at the end of the list, there was the killer item that's caught me out:

Travel packages and offers

Tours (including hotel, flight, and car reservations), travel clubs, and timeshare properties

Quite why Google have implemented this specific policy I have no idea but as Google's effectively judge and jury on policies such as this I suspect I have little chance of persuading them to change their mind. I've written to them to try to appeal but don't hold out much hope of getting anywhere.

I'm quite cross about the whole thing really, not just because of a policy that doesn't seem to make any sense, but also because of the time I have wasted in writing new website pages to advertise the option of paying by Google Checkout.

You can have a look at what I wrote over at my 'buy now' using Google Checkout page, which now sadly won't work until such a time as my Google Checkout account is reinstated (if ever).

Translating French (or lots of other languages) using Google

Google Translate

Hidden away in the corner of the Google translation page I found a useful link the other day to a set of Google translation buttons.

If you're using the fab Firefox browser then you can simply click drag a button to the Bookmarks toolbar (ensure View/Toolbars/Bookmarks toolbar is ticked if it's not visible) so that you have an instant translation engine just sitting there whenever you come across a bit of French you don't understand on the internet. Select the website text using the mouse, click the toolbar button, and you're instantly dropped into Google's translation engine with the appropriate text automatically converted. Easy peasy!

Cleverly Google's translation buttons page automatically recognises if you're using Internet Explorer instead of Firefox and gives you the option of creating an IE favourite which works in much the same way.

I also found on Mycroft's Firefox search engine list a set of Google search engine plugins lots of different facets of Google, including (section 12), a set of dictionary plugins. Select the one you want and it'll install in the drop-down search engine box in the top right of the screen.
To use it simply type the sentence you want to convert into the search text box, click the magnifying glass icon and get an instant translation, courtesy of Google.

Although the translation's not perfect they're usually good enough to get the gist of the content. I'm not going to trust Google with converting my Gite website from English to French though, I will have to find someone who writes far better French than I do and see if we can do a deal (hopefully involving multiple bottles of wine!) - any takers?

New Google Maps feature - send destination details to my BMW

Over on Google's Official Blog they've announced new feature to integrate Google Maps to BMW Assist.

On YouTube they've put together a video that shows someone reading looking up an address on Google maps and then emailing that to their BMW and then BMW 'accepting' it as a destination in the car satellite navigation system. How cool is that?

Here's the links to the YouTube video showing this feature, and the German video as well.



Interesting to see how technologies are starting to converge and Google's extending its influence to other areas. Pity my Nissan satnav doesn't do this.