Greg Linden started a great thread last year called Google Base and getting the crap out. Greg predicted that Google Base would "fill with crap," and he was right. Anybody could post or upload anything, including a bio of Eric Schmidt and a recipe for "crap on a stick." With no barrier to posting and no social recommendation system to surface the good stuff, free resources naturally fill with crap.

Since then, Google's come a long way. Most items expire in 31 days, so it takes a lot of work to keep updating crap in Base. And Google has been aggressive in cleaning the crap out -- Google recently removed a test upload Buygoogle did of US Senators and Representatives, and Google also killed the Eric Schmidt bio and the crapstick recipe.

Google has also instituted strict editorial rules on what can go in and what can't. But maybe they've gone too far trying to limit spammy travel crap.

I've sold a couple small items on Google Base now, using Google Payments and it's worked really well. Now I'm selling a high-end 35mm camera to see how a bigger-ticket transaction would work.

Everything was fine until tonight when I tried to add a link to a related item and Google flagged my description as spammy:


Apparently the word "travel" in the context of "vertical-travel, focal-plane shutter" is verboten. I could request an exemption, but that would take my item offline, and prohibit changes to it until a staffer gets around to reviewing it.

Hi there,

Thanks for the kind words about Google Base and Google Payments and sorry about the trouble you had earlier when trying to post an ad for your camera.

If you haven't already sold your camera, go ahead and give the posting another go -- we've done some tweaking to address the filtering issue.

- GoogleGuy