Google Base Launched. Yuck.

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1. Brad
   

   November 15th, 2005 at 11:05 pm

   Its not very functional right now. But it may be if you think about who might use it. Unstructured databases won’t be for the masses, this is more for mass listings and people who want to share massive amounts of information.

   If people wanted to post databases and share them they would but on their own servers, sloppy databases should be done this way not in a walled garden which is opt-in rather than the Search model of going out, finding it, and then making it available (opt-out).

   On that note: Storage is way to cheap to compel people to the cost of making their data public on a seperate servers, unless we are talking about the economics of spam here. (see splogs)

   The Problem I see is the massive amounts of Spam that could be thrown into the mix. If it’s actively opted-in information gathering then I give the edge to the Spammers. I hope they like storing massive amounts of STALE spam.

2. lakshmanan
   

   November 15th, 2005 at 11:32 pm

   Indeed fantastic….Long waited…
   google make you go goooooooggggglllleeee..tahnks to the institution and the people behind it…

3. lakshmanan
   

   November 15th, 2005 at 11:36 pm

   google can cook..google can date..
   google can follow..google can read…
   google can answer..google can couch-potatofy..ha ha..what google cannot??
   ask google..will tell you…

4. Michael Arrington
   

   November 15th, 2005 at 11:46 pm

   Lakshmanan - thanks very much for the insightful comments.

5. Jax
   

   November 15th, 2005 at 11:54 pm

   Still has a lots of things to be ironed out. I’ve been trying to test it out for more than an hour now. All I get is an error code. Your title says it perfectly

6. John
   

   November 16th, 2005 at 3:30 am

   So what’s being bulk uploaded?
   - spam
   - ebay auctions (spam)
   - web site links (spam)
   - rss feeds to existing sites (spam)
   - job sites (spam)
   - adsense sites (spam)
   - scraped content (spam)
   - spam
   - spam
   - spam

   Someone tell me how this will make search a better experience for the end user?

7. Jeff Rogers
   

   November 16th, 2005 at 4:35 am

   IMHO, Google Base is better than Google Search.

   Google Base has implemented ‘tagging’ of user-generated content which appears to now be more relevant than their search engine results.

   Going out and crawling web sites/blogs/xml feeds is nice & cute (and stupid and outdated) but tagging user generated content can product a relevant mix of results.

   I personally believe (actually I know- Google don’t have a choice) in 2006, Google will dump or minimize web crawling/search all together and build on this ‘base’ model. Google has to obsolete the over-celebrated concept of ’search’ if they want to stay on cutting edge.

8. Jeff Rogers
   

   November 16th, 2005 at 4:44 am

   BTW, Mike. I notice Mossberg at the WSJ did not include Techcrunch. Well, I personally think his links/favorites is outdated, especially the SEO shill posing as a search expert who has a serious grudge against tagging.

9. Tinus
   

   November 16th, 2005 at 4:57 am

   I think this is gonna be HUGE. They are testing the basis of what will be an enormous undertaking, namely killing Ebay and Craigslist at the same time.

10. Dan Gottlieb
    

    November 16th, 2005 at 6:46 am

    With the addition of basic reporting capabilities, I think there would be some value in a private version of Base targeted at corporations (hosted for small business; intranet appliance for mid-sized and large firms). Companies have a real need to quickly create ad-hoc searchable databases for in-house use. Currently the only real option is QuickBasic, which is pretty limited.

11. Farrel Lifson
    

    November 16th, 2005 at 6:56 am

    Can you say “free image hosting”? Just put it into Google Base and if it’s in their ‘Reference’ section they’ll host it forever.

12. Yosef
    

    November 16th, 2005 at 7:30 am

    The problem with them creating content and providing a search is like them spitting in their own bucket.

    Google is selling keyword ads. Let say for jobs in chicago. Now I”m paying google 3$ for every click. At the same time google is now competing with me on my own turf by allowing job postings.

    Google has now become my competitor. Why would I pay them 3$ for every click, I”m giving money to my competitor by supporting their services.

    The only way that this will work for google is that people will outway the benefits of these keywords ads ie that it is working. Imho I don’t think the ROI is worth it. I don’t remember ever clicking on a ad link and then buying something. Therefore I believe google’s stock is way over valued, and we are going to think of this era as the google bomb.

13. Scott
    

    November 16th, 2005 at 8:25 am

    base.gooogle.com writes usernames in permanent URLs via their GUI (e.g. your email address!). This could be a massive spam trap. First heard on Gmail-Lounge.

14. Tim
    

    November 16th, 2005 at 8:40 am

    Perhaps someone could actually do us a favour and explain how it’s meant to work?

    So far, I see 3 influences on it:
    a) a desire to move away from content-indexing
    b) ?yahoo?’s ajaxian slider where you could choose between commercial or research-style search results
    c) google’s own field-specific searches: anyone remember google.com/linux ?

    However, I’m not convinced about the ideas that it’s up to us to upload files by http or ftp, or that we have to do the work in applying tags to content, or that there’s any tag-category/content differentiation required - whatever happened to flat anarchic tagging?

15. m3mnoch
    

    November 16th, 2005 at 11:12 am

    i’m not really sure why more people aren’t getting it, but base is a pushstart to the semantic web.

    folks that enter data into base are the kind of disciplined data-defining folks the semantic web needs. but how is google going to use it?

    simple, aside from the obvious mash-up/api stuff, they are going to index the information against their own search database. that means they can infer pertinent information based on a ‘data match’ between search indexes and base indexes.

    using an easy recipe example:
    say you do a search for ‘tyson foods’, well, the search results will form around tyson foods. based on the page indexing of tyson foods, google base now can also suggest chicken recipes. it can do that becuase unstructured indexed content can match up with structured indexed content. this matchup allows them to assume certain ‘attributes’ for the unstructured content. you didn’t search for chicken recipes, but the information is now linked together.

    it’s sort of like adsense, but for all sorts of information — not just ads.

    m3mnoch.

16. Ethan
    

    November 16th, 2005 at 5:08 pm

    How does Google intend to deal with the signal to noise problems endemic to any normalized data submission engine? Is there a reputation system?

    I love the idea of truely normalized data on a massive basis, but without some bidirectional feedback, it is nearly useless.

17. Tom
    

    November 16th, 2005 at 6:42 pm

    Am I the only one who get’s a little sick seeing everyone bow down to Google? I’m glad at least Mike gave it a fair review - “meh” is the best way to describe it. Yay, it’s structured, but who cares? It adds little value to anything…

18. Naveed Ahmed
    

    November 17th, 2005 at 9:25 am

    Its more than ugly. Information sharing wont work that way. I think Google Base is going to be one of Google’s flop projects or atleast close to flop.

19. ticketwood
    

    July 7th, 2006 at 3:44 am

    I personally believe (actually I know- Google don’t have a choice) in 2006, Google will dump or minimize web crawling/search all together and build on this ‘base’ model. Google has to obsolete the over-celebrated concept of ’search’ if they want to stay on cutting edge.

20. fatality9nvj
    

    July 21st, 2006 at 12:54 am

    Ein Schloss, Ein poker Wurst, Ein Kopf !nvj

21. apply for credit
    

    January 23rd, 2007 at 7:21 am

    Don’t like some latest google ‘improvements’ too.

22. Jeremy Horn
    

    March 1st, 2007 at 3:54 pm

    Hey, you don’t have to worry about the new Expiration Date requirement if you set up an account over at SingleFeed — we fully support the expiration date and make sure that it is always present, always valid (30 days from today), and make sure your product feed and any updates are submitted EVERY DAY — with an accurate and always live (30 days from upload) expiration date.

    Please, come try us out for Google Base, and you can also, using the same feed, set up for product submission to many of the other popular shopping engines (shopping.com, shopzilla, nextag, etc.)

    Jeremy Horn
    SingleFeed