Google Base Launched. Yuck.
Michael Arrington
61 comments »
Google Blog officially announces the launch of Google Base. We previously anticipated the launch of Google Base (along with everyone else) in late October.
Bottom Line: This is not a very interesting application in its current form. Keith Teare says it’s like a 1985 dBASE file with less functionality. It’s ugly. It’s centralized content with less functionality than ebay or craigslist. The content is not integrated directly into Google search results, but “relevance” can bump it up into main and local search (and froogle).
Rob Hof’s at Business Week is also blase about it. He says “eBay and others may not have much to fear just yet”
Additional information and FAQs on Google Base in the About section.
- Cost: Free
- Item types accepted: All types of online and offline information and images
- Languages: You can submit your information in many languages; the Google Base interface, however, including the Help Content, is currently available only in English, English UK and German.
- Reach: Items you submit to Google Base can be found on Google Base and, depending on their relevance, may also appear on Google properties like Google, Froogle and Google Local.
- How it’s different: Google Base enables you to add attributes that better describe your content so that users can easily find it. The more popular specific attributes become, the more often we’ll suggest them when others post the same items. Similarly, items that become more popular will show up as suggested item types in the Choose an existing item type drop down menu.
There are two ways to upload data - a web interface for one item at a time and a bulk uploading option to send content in XML.
I’ve tested Google Base out. The general idea is that you pick a category for your post. There are suggested categories - course calendars, events and activities, jobs, reviews, wanted ads, etc. You can also create your own category.
Each category has its own fields to ease data input. For instance, the “vehicles” category includes fields for vehicle type, year, make, etc. You fill out any or all of these fields, add additional fields (called “attributes”) if you choose, and add a title, description and keywords (tags). You can also upload a picture or point to a picture on the web.
I found a few bugs in this form. For instance, adding “techcrunch” as a tag failed because it was “misspelled” and it simply wouldn’t include it.
Once I removed the techcrunch tag I was able to add an expiration date and post my test content, which is published after a short delay, along with a permanent URL (this is just a quick test).
Once content is published, it can be edited from a dashboard.
Content can also be searched at Google Base. The above screen shot is a search for “recipes”. Clicking on a particular item pulls up its permanent URL (example), where full details can be viewed and the posted contacted via email.
Brian Benzinger has a more positive review here. And check out what Dave Winer has to say (”It’s microcontent without the schemas”).
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.
Indeed fantastic….Long waited…
google make you go goooooooggggglllleeee..tahnks to the institution and the people behind it…
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…
Lakshmanan - thanks very much for the insightful comments.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
Ein Schloss, Ein poker Wurst, Ein Kopf !nvj
Don’t like some latest google ‘improvements’ too.
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