Reports are out that Google Base will be launching soon, perhaps even today. Dirson has a screen shot up on Flickr and additional images are on Wouter Schut’s blog.
Google Base appears to be a service to publish content directly to google and have them host it in a centralized way. If so, this would be going completely against the accelerating trend of decentralized publishing.
My prediction: when the dust settles, this will either be largely ignored or universally hated. Centralized content is boring…so much is going on at the edge of the web, why would anyone try to put it all back in the center?
Philipp Lenssen has more details, including the text from the screen shot below:
Post your items on Google.
Google Base is Google’s database into which you can add all types of content. We’ll host your content and make it searchable online for free.
Examples of items you can find in Google Base:
• Description of your party planning service
• Articles on current events from your website
• Listing of your used car for sale
• Database of protein structuresYou can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle and Google Local.
UPDATE: Tom Oliveri, Product Marketing Manager at Google, has posted a short note about Google Base on the Google blog:
You may have seen stories today reporting on a new product that we’re testing, and speculating about our plans. Here’s what’s really going on. We are testing a new way for content owners to submit their content to Google, which we hope will complement existing methods such as our web crawl and Google Sitemaps. We think it’s an exciting product, and we’ll let you know when there’s more news.
Thanks Anthony.
Almost sounds like a Universal CraigsList. A kind of community bulletin board for the internet? Craigslist is fairly popular and if google goes after it, it could be quite the issue.
I think success will depend on how Google uses the data to help those who provide it. Take the Froogle mention, for example – if merchants discover that adding information about their products to Google Base helps them get more traffic and sell more stuff, they’ll do so. If it helps them get a lot more traffic and sell a *lot* more product, a whole industry will spring up around just *helping* them use it. Sales talk louder than decentralization vs. centralization.
I’m curious to see how Google keeps out proprietary information, spam, or other undesirable stuff, though. I can see the headlines now – “Google serves up complete genome of 1918 influenza virus,” etc.
The name is unfortunate. The amount of AYB puns across the blogosphere will number in the dozens, I fear. As will the usual “OMG Google is evil!” posts. I would argue Google is lawful neutral.
Yeah. Sounds lame. They need to understand the concept of situated software. People fall in love with a ch services that have personality not generic (we hold anything you want ) services.
Kevin
I really like the idea of edge-based structured content and I think it’ll have an impact moving forward, but:
- I think people associate “massive distribution” with Google and everyone wants massive distribution. Everyone with something to sell wants it to reach as many people as it can. That’s why most efforts to dethrone eBay have failed miserably.
- In the end, if you’re going to do any sort of efficient querying, the data has to be centralized — even in the edge case (unless there’s a breakthrough hovering just above the horizon that I’m not privy to). The difference between the two then really comes down to inputting the data directly to the central repository or inputing it on an edge node and then having it synced to a central database at a later time. This begs the question: Are edge solutions really edge or are they simply centralized with delay?
- Let’s say Six Apart and Blogger add structured edge data services (as well as some yet-to-be-announced services) and people can now sell things on their blog in a structured way. Even if you disregard the above statement, is the edge really “edge” — after all, it is still being aggregated/centralized via the blog hosting service — just in smaller name spaces. That makes the data collection easier for the aggregators, but it still takes you back to my second point. If you’re going to approach the true “edge” condition, then data almost needs to be stored on individual computers. Storing it using any aggregator of any kind (blog hosting service or other) is, by definition, not edge.
- There is definitely a psychological difference (in my mind anyway) when a piece of data is on my blog vs. when I enter the data into a database directly. I own and control the structured data equally in *both* instances, but when it’s in my blog, I can wrap an unstructured context around it, give it more personality, generate some amount of ad-sense revenue from it, and drive more traffic to my blog. The question is, is the psychological difference enough? Will people just put a link to their blog in Google Base along with the text “visit my blog for more info!” ? Or perhaps people will do both if the proper tools come along.
That said, I think Google Base could fail if a) they are unable to control fraud (also a problem on the edge) and 2) the UI just plains sucks. I’m not saying it will suck, but if it does, then that’s a problem. I could be wrong about this, but I think Google has a better chance of controlling fraud because they’re centralized. They can easily ask for a credit card number of some such thing to verify identity. That could be a little more difficult on the edge.
I wouldn’t be surprised if, down the road, many of the edge players aggregate the edge data and also export it out to Google Base (and ebay and …) and thus centralizes it on behalf of the user in order to maximize distribution. Or, on the flip side, Google can spider the edge and make that data available via their central database system. Either way, with Google in the game, it makes pure-edge a much more challenging proposition — but that’s the fun of it, right?
Of course, I’m hoping you have something up your sleeve to prove me wrong…
– Scott
Hmmm. You don’t think they’ll merge in Google Wallet, Google Talk and try and compete with the eBay/Skype juggernaut?
Please see QuickBase. My guess is google will be rolling out a service very similar to QuickBase – the interesting difference I see is the ability to share type definitions.
I want to comment publicly but will not.
@8 buk – interesting thought. I use and develop in Quickbase daily for work. Awesome product btw. This doesn’t feel like it is in quite the same space. We’ll see.
This sort of thing could be a godsend for small businesses that don’t have time to:
a) hunt for cheap, reliable webhosting
b) set up a website
c) set up a database (and setting up a database is hard. Try talking to small business person about third normal form and watch their eyes glaze over.)
I just saw a post on the Google Blog about this…
What would be interesting is to see the kind of generalized search interface they would create for this service.
And will we have access through web services?
I suppose it’s time to go back and take a look at Paul Ford’s classic post
“August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web”!
Sounds like a good idea but
Google will crash all the classifieds and other listing services ONLY because it has larger user base and more money to support it. I can see small businesses running after it initially but the situation will turn 180 degrees from the expected one. Originally listing might attract more clients but over the time everyone will be there so being on the Google will not provide any advantage however not being on Google will almost certainly ruin your business. Original hype over more customers will help to build a monster that will control information sharing. Froogle is quite similar but not to that extend. I only hope for people posting tons of garbage on it making it useless and hence harmless to others.
As an affiliate marketer – this will really take away from from my eBay commission business. Why? There are thousands of people like myself who target certain keywords using Google Adwords and make commission by linking to eBay to make a commission. Now I have a feeling those ads will be replaced with the Google Base Ads.
This can be an interesting turn – perhaps Google will have some affiliate program?!
I started a new forum where we can all discuss Google Base. I hope that you all join me in this!
http://www.googlebasetalk.com
Those guys Google are really brillant. They still manage to come up with something as ordinary looking as Google Base that will change a whole industry.
))
Travel get paid for it and earn a extra $1000 month.