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Google Developing Database Service
QuantumT writes "Ars Technica has the details on the unannounced Google
Base service that will allow anyone with a Google Account to post information and other types of data into a massive, Google-run database. Ars believes that the company is
gearing up to take on eBay and Craiglist, which makes sense given the Google Payment service that is in development. Google has commented, saying, 'This is an early-stage test of a
product that enables content owners to easily send their content to Google. Like our web crawl and the recently released Google Sitemaps program, we are working to provide content
owners an easy way to give us access to their content.' There's a few screenshots as well."
Perhaps more importantly, this move positions Google as potentially the pre-eminent publishing house with an inherent built in search engine. Anything that goes into the database will be "intimately" searchable. From my perspective as a bioscientist, the ability to be able to search journal articles not just for text, but also for image data or graph data would be absolutely huge.
Google has previously posted their position about Google Print here where they documented superficially their desire to enable people to search for "books". However, more importantly, it is the content within the "books" that will become more ubiquitous and more available.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
They've said in the past that the next big step in search is searching databases that other people own. This would seem to be the interface to make that possible. i.e. rather than web crawling to attempt to harvest data, they have people push it to them. Sidesteps the copyright and robots.txt problem. If you want your data to be searchable then you push it to Google.
I'm just drawing up a reply to a RFI from a health provider. They are upgrading their medical records database.
My solution included oracle on linux servers.
I'll just use this instead..but just say I'm providing the infrastructure.
Yassah.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
If this data is ever going to become useful, Google will needs to create a system for moderation of informational accuracy and usefulness. Their page-ranking mechanism is a good start, but I just don't trust it to tell me that the first few results on a subject I'm researching are accurate.
This is why Google also needs a trust network. They certainly could begin to leverage Orkut to do this. I'd give more credence to an information source if I knew that someone in my trust network also gave credence to it.
Google doesn't seem to have a unified and communicated vision. Sure, they can hire the most talented engineers and they can keep cranking out the coolest toys, but what would actually move the internet forward is a way to combine all of those toys into a single, simple platform. For example, combine Orkut and page ranking. Rank my search results differently than someone else's because they have different trust relationships. In my opinion, Google has had only one real hit so far, and that's Google Earth. With that much corporate intelligence, I'd like to see Google doing more.
What data is not considered information, and vice-versa?
Random strings maybe.
Ye Olde Way : create content -> host it yourself/at an ISP -> various search engines (including Google) will index it -> others can search it.
Ye Google Base Way : create content -> submit to Google Base -> others can search it only though Google.
Google would be wasting massive resources in this, if they ever launch it, and their only benefit would be that they would in a way 'own' that content. I don't believe they would be making this content available to MSN or Yahoo. The stench of evil is just too much, Google !
you gain ease of use
doing it on your own is hard and expensive
basically, google is now acting as your website
i'm just waiting for the google-hosted porn sites, like yahoo groups
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Let's just call it AOL+
You take the world's most successfully decentralised network, and for convenience and searchability you umm.... centralise it...
Take all the power of anyone being able to interconnect which allows free speech to flourish all over the world (even in China if you're wise enough) and then umm.... put it all into the control of one corporate entity in the United States.
Remember the situation with China... Google (as a corporatation) complied with the law and handed over private gmail information to the Chinese authorities trying stiffle free speech... now image if _everything_ is subject to that control mechanism?
Google is already so powerful that if your business isn't listed easily in the results you might as well pack up and go home... this just makes that problem even worse.
Basically Google wants to kill the Internet, to make it work better. AOL didn't die... the whole internet became AOL....
gmail.com is to mail.google.com as http://googlebase.com/ will be to base.google.com?
Surviving America
Well, if it is publicly searchable, then all Google has to do is let the FBI search for watch words. Which ought to be easy enough. Even if it isn't publicly searchable, then it'll be just like gmail, they have to let the Feds in when the law says they do.
But Google is itself immune from prosecution under the Betamax decision, and the Grokster case, since all it needs is a legitimate primary use, unless Google like publicly supports the use of the software for illegal purposes. Or something like that. IANAL, nor am I pre-law.
I think Google have done anything but take their eye off the ball. Remember how Froogle and Google Local were once beta projects, and are now integrated with google.com search? And then Google Maps was slipped into the equation. define: has been moved out of a little-known backwater of the site and integrated with google.com...
Google having a foot in all the doors simply means they are finding the best way to index and search that information. It won't surprise me if they all end up integrated somewhere with just plain Google Search, to the extent that they lose their own 'section'. Google Base is simply (from what I can tell) a huge database of everything, which (chances are) will end up integrated.
I want to be able to log in to Google and have all my own data at my fingertips, easily searchable, and for the engine behind it all to know what I'm after. At the moment, powerful though other web searches may be, Google is the only company to attempt to unify everything for the users. If Google can provide what I'm after, I would be willing to pay a significant amount of money to have them organise all my data, be it news, emails, contacts, files, web history, chats, driving directions, cinema times... the list goes on.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
calendar.google.com redirects me to google.com, while other links like
audio.google.com or browser.google.com, says "siteurl could not be found. Please check the name and try again."
Is google also developing calendar?
As I said in another comment, an example of a problem I sometimes have is that I have some content that I would like to share with the world, but no decent way of doing it. Sometimes I can mesh it into Wikipedia or something... but other times there's no place to put it. Or maybe putting it somewhere else is complicated. Like I have a recipe or a cool trick to solve a problem in Linux. I could make an account with some recipe website or with Linuxforum.org or whatever, but that's a pain. I just want to make the information available to people. I could make my own mini-website and host it, but no one would ever find it.
But if GoogleBase exists, and I just upload content, and let Google index it for me, I'm done. I can refer friends to it (either via URL or even by describing it, and letting them just do a search for it). I can even upload (non-private) files that I often need to refer to... and then they are always accessible. In fact, since GoogleBase will probably have a private mode, I can use this as a network drive that is accessible anywhere in the world. Not only that, but it does automatic backups and is automatically indexed and searchable. So for semi-private documents that I always need access to, it's great. I post my CV and then I can casually refer somewhere to where it is located. I don't have to pay for webspace.
Many people use the GMail File System hack so that they can use their GMail account as if it were a hard drive. Google is formalizing it so that we can have access to data easily. I think this solves alot of problems for alot of users. The tradeoff is that I get free web-hosting and even free network storage, as long as I agree to have them index it. Many people are willing.
This is Microsoft's scrapped Hailstorm initiative all over again. Except that it's Google doing it. It's interesting to note that two of Haistorm's key architects (Mark Lucovsky & Adam Bosworth) now work at Google.
I suppose they think the same idea would work if a different company did this.
Google will never charge for raw search results (as opposed to adwords). Google has plenty of competition that does exactly that, and uses underhanded methods (i.e. spyware) to direct people to their sites. Despite these tricks, those sites are nowhere near as popular as Google and don't make the kind of money Google does. Google is not going to mess that up.
Your observations would appear to mean that Google Adwords are effective advertising.
My business partner and I have a business here, and even though it's geographically focused to a specific area, AdWords has been our most effective advertising, comfortably surpassing TV and radio advertising and even exceeding our second most effective method, blanket handing out of flyers.
It's hard to get away from monopolies, especially in small markets like ours. For example, Comcast, the cable provider we used for our TV ads, is a monopoly, too. Google Adwords is effectively a monopoly. Whichever one is effective is what we'll continue to use; it may be an evil monopoly, but it's saved us from the evil of the other guys. It was a lot cheaper than TV ads.
D
Google may not be aiming to become Big Brother, but they're certainly aiming to provide every single service they possibly can.
And so the transformation of Google into Yahoo is almost complete... I actually had the pleasure of predicting this to a couple of Google managers a few years ago when I was car pooling with them back up 101. I was the only non-Googler in the car. The conversation eventually got around to how to add more services while maintaining the "simplicity". I predicted that eventually, all services would end up doing the same kind of portal crap as Yahoo/AOL/MSN/Excite, etc. remember, those services became portals before the word "portal" was ever invented. I also predicted that the real rot would set in after the IPO, when Google attracted a lot of people from other companies who wanted to add that sort of stuff, because that was how they had done it in their previous jobs. And that was what the market expected. And once you're a public fad stock, shareholders demand "growth" stories to keep the high valuation and want you to add functionality, no matter how orthogonal that growth might be to your core business. It's feature creep, writ large.
The rest of the trip was a bit frosty.
Da Blog
What data is not considered information, and vice-versa?
Data is a set of raw facts. (A stream of bits, for example.) After you apply some sort of algorithm to it, it becomes information. (A digitized image, for example.) After you mentally process the information and consider it within the context of the situation, it becomes knowledge. (Goatse.cx, for example.)
Of course, there are some kinds of knowledge most people would rather not have.
Am I the only one to miss the official announcement of this? I've heard rumors about it for years, but when did it become a given?
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
I am glad to see someone is reading my http://www.sarver.org/site ;) ... but to elaborate ...
To me what Google is doing is not "innovative" or "novel" in the terms of the logic behind what you see as the GoogleBase application... as it has been done many time over. Quickbase, Intranets.com and so many others have done the same thing (http://www.google.com/search?q=web+database). However, what is novel, is the fact that they are positioned to take full advantage of the information that you are inputting to their system and use it in such a way that allows them to leverage their existing search infrastructure to better index your content. Previous to this attempt, each company was solely positioned as a software product company, not as a search, or integrated search company... nor had any company opened their kimono in such a way as to allow other ASPs to use their back end as THE backend. kudos...
I agree. I've been to a number of Google tech talk/recruiting sessions and they really emphasize the small groups inside the company. Most projects seem to be 2-4 people. Only when a product nears launch do more people get involved (lawyers, UI designers, translators, etc.). I thought they said that Gmail was done by about four people for most of the time. When you have this many groups, of course there will be lots of diversity. Sometimes when I see a new product or one-box coming out of the Googleplex, I get worried that they are losing their focus and relevance (for a while they had two competing "definitive answer" one-boxes that sometimes both showed up for one query; I can't remember the names exactly, but I thought it looked pretty bad... where was the coordination?). However, most projects get fixed up and made better, and I regain faith in Google. Right now I'm most skeptical about the Web Accelerator (just because of all the problems it has had).
:)
Also, you are correct. Google has just started rolling out phase two of a three phase update to their ranking engine (dubbed jagger update). A lot of SEO folk are complaining about losing placement, and if they are complaining, I think that means we are getting better results
Andrew