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."

Comments

Content is king

[BWJones]

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.