Playing Around with Google Pages

Categories: Tools
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Published on: April 24, 2006

I got finally an Invitation to create an account at Google’s new Service (still in beta) called “Google Pages” or “Google Page Creator”.

I tried to create an account there already a while back, but as always, they had not enough server resources available to handle the amount of traffic, because of interest in the new services by a lot of people and disabled the creation of new accounts on the same day they announced it to the public.

My First Pages
My first impression was very positive, but I realized quickly, why the service is still in beta. It has still a lot of minor to severe flaws and some features require a lot more tweaking and improving before they should release the service from beta and make it available to the general public.
You can have a look at my Test Pages here.

No IFrames allowed
I noticed that even if you modify the HTML Code of the pages directly, that certain things are not allowed and “stripped” out of the page when you publish it, such as Amazon Ads which use JavaScript and IFrames . I assume that the IFrames are the problem and removed by Google Pages, because they are a possible security issue, if abused. The blocking of IFrames prevents the possible abuse of the Google Pages service by fraudsters that may try to do things like installing malicious software on the visitors machine. This is one of the notorious misuses of IFrames .

No External JavaScript / No Google AdSense
External JavaScript Code seems to be prohibited in general, because even Google AdSense Code was removed automatically. That is something I do not understand. Okay, if they strip 3rd Party external JavaScript understandable. Also I they want to prevent that a User places AdSense Ads uncontrolled anywhere on the Pages. The ability to place AdSense Ads on those Pages should be of high interest by Google since it allows them to increase their Advertising Revenue. Any build in function to place AdSense Ads somewhere into Google Pages is not in sight anywhere. I assume though that this will be coming. It would simply be stupid of Google, if they would not provide this feature to Google Pages users.

No JavaScript allowed at all
Google Pages does not allow any JavaScript to be added at all. This is a bummer and limits the ability of what you can do with your Pages. I hope Google will eventually allow JavaScript to a certain extend to allow experienced Users to improve their pages. Even blogger allows the inclusion of Javascript. “Internal” and “External”.

No Tools
There does not exist the ability to create any Forms or in general ANY interactive content which severely limits the use of Google Pages. This is also something the Google Pages team should work on. Basic stuff like a contact form that integrates with Google GMail, the publishing of Feeds from Google Reader or the Integration of Google Maps and Google News. Google Analytics can’t be added to the Pages as well.

Indexing of Google Pages by Google Search
What I haven’t found out yet, is if Google automatically adds Google Pages to the content to be crawled by it’s Web Crawler and adds it automatically to its Search Index. A Search in the Google Index reveals that over 46,000 Google pages were already indexed and added to Google’s Search Index as of today. This tends me to believe that the pages are automatically crawled by Google.

Conclusion
Google Pages is surely for a good reason still in Beta Status and will probably remain in that Status for a while longer. The existing features have still a lot of flaws and a lot of very important features are missing all together. Google Pages does also not interface with any other existing Google Service although Google Pages is a perfect candidate to exploit and showcase a wide variety of existing Google Services (live and beta ones). Google has still a long way to go with this service to provide a useful tool for the general public. I see it’s use today as a place where you can create some static pages with content to link to from you blog at Blogger or other Blogging Services. It is certainly not enough for most folks to create their complete Homepage/Presence on the Internet.

1 Comment
  1. This personal post and some other comments and feedbacks resulted eventually into a real article which can be found here:

    http://www.cumbrowski.com/CarstenC/articles/20060424_Google_Pages_Demystified.asp

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