Google announces Google Base. Google Base enables content owners to easily make their information searchable online. Anyone, from large companies to website owners and individuals, can use it to submit their content in the form of data items. We’ll host the items and make them searchable for free.
As far as I can tell, here are the main features:
- You describe the items that you post with attributes, that is tags that describe or catalog the items. The tagged items will be searched by the Google search engine and will be more accessible to people looking for these sorts of items.
- Items can be online information, including images, video and sound but thay also can be “offline” information (competition with eBay and craigslist, anyone?).
- This might be useful to people who don’t want to design a whole web page or series of web pages and services to support the distribution of information about said items.
- Presumably this opens up your items to a much larger audience. Unlike searching through millions of web pages with unstandardized categories, people will more easily find you and your item. Of course, what happens when there are millions of items?
- It’s free. I assume that Google makes money off the banner ads.
The feature was announced on Google Blog. Google has a blog? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
I love this comment from slashdot:
Google to me seems like a new Catholicism. Everything consolidated under a monolithic central power with a mandate of “doing no evil”. They send missionaries in the form of Bots and Ad Words to uncharted territory seemingly to help netizens in the wild, while gathering statistical data about what large masses of people are doing where, when and why. With this they can build their own versions of everything. Your home (page) is nothing compared to their cathedral. Heathens flock to it and erode their old societies under Google (capital G).
I tried Google base and immediately found a link on virtual activism and on environmental nonprofit organizations.