All Your Google Base Etc Etc Etc

My my my, didn't my mailbox has something to get filled up with today besides the usual round of home loan confirmations and >cough cough cough cough< pillz.

My first heads-up came from -- The Wall Street Journal? If the Wall Street Journal's reporting it, I thought, then there have to be some screen shots out there somewhere. And I was right!

Google Base, for those of you who aren't into the WSJ, appears to be some kind of expansion into online classifieds. I did some poking around on news search engines for more information, and came up with eh. A poke around the blogs brought much more information.

Google Blogoscoped has a roundup at http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-10-25-n57.html and includes some quotes from the Google Base site itself (which at the moment is a big 403): "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."

So this is something less structured than Blogger? Or something structured in a different way? GoogleWiki would be interesting. (I don't think that's what this it, but it would be interesting.) Blogoscoped also has a bunch of screenshots at http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-10-26-n16.html My, this is for unstructured data, isn't it. It looks like you can list everything from events to recipes to advertisements.

Ars Technica has a brief writeup at http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051025-5480.html, noting, "By letting people post nearly anything, Google will get their hands on a massive database of items that have been given user-created attributes. Google then can use that data to try and generate a kind of universal tagging schema for information and items, which could then be used to classify information across the net."

I may not be understanding this correctly, but doesn't Google already have a massive database of items that, if not with user-created attributes, have at least been subdivided into fairly narrow categories? It's called Google Directory. And what have they done with that? Is that not tagged enough? Is categorization insufficient?

SearchEngineWatch, as always, has a comprehensive writeup at http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/051025-130423 with several postscripts (Gary never sleeps!). Gary comments, "Any type of info could be posted and attributes added to it to make it easier to find. Google is getting into a bit of semi-structured info. I've said for a long time that for tags to really succeed, a more structured form of tagging would be needed."

Google did make a comment on their own blog this evening, though it doesn't say much. From http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/10/rumor-of-day.html : "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."

Well, now I feel totally informed.

The idea of Google opening up this big laundry hamper for us to store our digital stuff is interesting, but I have a big concern. It's the same concern that makes me use specialty search engines instead of Google sometimes. Sometimes you want the biggest possible data pool. But sometimes the biggest data pool is too big. It's not structured enough. It has no focus. In some circumstances it makes searching more difficult.

Google's tagging and structure system better be really good -- really, really good -- or we're just going to end up with another data pool that's difficult to plumb. Which brings me to another cringeworthy thought -- how is Google Base going to defend itself against spammers? Arrrggghhhhhhh.....

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