Now Google Base Really Do All Belong To Us

After a lot of speculation and sites that went up and down, Google has announced that they've released their Google Base service. The announcement's at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/11/first-base.html and the service itself is at http://base.google.com .

From the first page of the site you have the option to search Google Base or add your own item. I'm adding an event. I choose the Events and Activities template from the pull down menu on the right side of the page and away I go. (If you have many items you can add them with a bulk upload. Bulk uploads can be in delimited format or in RSS or ATOM feeds. If you want to list your items for sale in Froogle or your business locations in Google Local, you can upload them to Google Base.)

The page is basically a big fill-in form. Form fields include the date of event, date, parking information, cost, description, contact information, and a Web page. You can add up to ten pictures from either a local source or from a URL. At the bottom you can specify how long the listing will list. Currently event listings only last for 31 days, which is annoying; If I were the Chapel Hill Public Library and wanted to add all my book sales for the next year, I could do it but they'd only last 31 days. Feh.

When you've filled out all the information for your Google Base item, you'll have the option to save a draft, preview, or publish it. To publish it or save a draft, you'll need to be logged into a Google account.

There are annoying things. When I was using the service (with Firefox) I paged backward to change one attribute. When I moved forward again the entire event had vanished from the form and I had to start over. Yay. Also, it appears that at least with the events template, only the title of the event is required. Does that mean Google Base is going to fill up with a lot of minimally-informational, badly-filled-out event forms? Let us hope not.

That's the adding side of it. Let's do the searching side. I ran a search for chicken. I got 180 results which ranged from everything from recipes to movie reviews to a pointer to a Web site called Savage Chickens, which is a guy who draws chicken cartoons on sticky notes. (It's actually pretty funny.) Some of the items have pictures. At the top of the page you have the option to make your search more specific (to jobs, location, job type, etc.) while at the top right you have the option to sort the items by relevance, most recent post, or oldest post.

Search results look rather like they do with a regular Google Web search. Some key differences include that you can see the author of the item (and click on their name to get a list of things they've uploaded), see the tags with which the item has been marked, and have access to a link that lets you report an item as bad (spam, pornographic, violating copyright, etc.)

There are special syntax which work with Google Base search. intitle: works. inurl: works, though most of the items are hosted at Google so it's of limited use (to see items that are pointers to Web pages and are not hosted by Google, add -inurl:google to your search.)

I have some concerns and some disappointments. First thing I'm concerned about is that this service is going to get overrun with spaham in short order. Will Google be able to keep up with people posting gunk to the service? Second is a concern that should vanish as the 'Base gets more populated; when I did some area searches I found my results overwhelmed with bulk uploads from one particular place.

My disappointments have more to do with how the tags were handled. I'm glad tags are included, but why not some aggregation? I'd love to see a few tag clouds, especially by category, or do a search by zip code and get a tag cloud for my area. Just a "birds-eye" view of what's being posted and what's popular in a particular location.

This is just a roundup of impressions from a 6 AM test drive. I'll try to do a little bit more digging later.

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