Slashdot Mirror
Google Base Launches
An anonymous reader writes "As announced on the Google Blog, Google Base has finally launched. According to Google, 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."
But bad for private intranet sites. For anything where privacy is significant, the Google appliance (or Google mini) will still be in high demand. The
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
All your Google base are belong to us.
Great, so now our top results are going to be clutered with samples of the info we're really looking for
Thanks, google
I'm paying even odds that in twenty years, Google is the oppressive world government. They've add their fingers to 10 or 15 big new pies per week, and it's only a matter of time before they get to the governmental one.
Does anyone know what they are planning on doing to make sure data is up to date?
I can just see things happening like a school putting up all of their course information and not keeping it up to date.
What exacty goes into base? As I've understood it everything is supposed to go into Google base, right?
Could wikipedia be imported to Google base?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Does the TOS really restrict this? And does such a clause make it necessary for them to police the database for infringements?
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Is it me or does it seem like Google is average 1 new service/product every 2 months or so. This is a scary pace. The part I am most amazed by is that ALL their services scale very well.
Like Wikipedia, this idea has great potential. Like Wikipedia, this will have many problems. What's to stop this from suffering under a heavy load of spam, honest mistakes, and deliberate mischeif?
I wonder if Google will have any plans to create an API for base, or at least integrate it into their existing search API. It would be pretty neat to be able to create applications that would automatically submit the information for you, rather than having to perform the bulk-upload method that I suppose *could* be automated...
Thoughts?
So, regular Google is their search crawlers going out and indexing information, while Google Base is people submitting information to be indexed in categories that submitters assign themselves. Is that right? Or is there more to this? Is this like a subsection of the search engine, or an informal free webhosting service? I'm just not sure of what this is or why it's necessary.
I tried publishing something and it told me I published over 200 articles already. Then I clicked 'save draft', and it gave me an error.
God spoke to me.
sound like single (as in url location) database of massive information to me.
... I really wish I would have got some of that IPO a while back...
If they release an api for this...holy crap. How incredibly useful. One could, say, write a content management system that runs on google base rather than mysql or whatever. Or who knows what other cool shit the hackers will come up with. This concept is SO powerful its kind of...freaky. So much of the internet could fit onto this one little idea.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
for a minute there I thought they were finally launching Copernicus Center, their Lunar base.
WTF?
I tried the google base. i tried creating a new content-type called 'Presence' it crashes with the message '-5.5'. the site is unstable as of now.
The purpose of all philosophers was to impress women
http://base.google.com/base/base_policies.html/
The list of banned content is great!
Hacking and Cracking Sites - Posting is not permitted for the promotion of hacking or cracking. For example, items must not provide instructions or equipment to illegally access or tamper with software, servers, or websites.
Aids to Pass Drug Tests - Posting is not permitted for the promotion of products such as drug cleansing shakes and urine test additives.
Too much!
For Slashdot, this is a royal flush, no?
Sexual Content
(Adult) Posting is not permitted for the promotion of child pornography or other non-consensual material.
Does that mean people are allowed to post most of their pr0n? That would be...disturbing...Interesting for others, but not for the soccer moms.
There was an error with the page you requested.
Please check back later.
This is more or less what was done with companies wishing to have their product database indexed within Froogle.
It was actually a nice implementation for a complicated process, and it only took them a week to approve our data feed and begin listing our items.
We upload a new feed as frequently as we need to.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
So if we can use Google Base for free, does that mean we can free base? Far out, man.
Most people probably don't know about this, (and it's why they're so secretive about letting people see their data centers). See, the secret is actually that their entire supercomputing grid is based on the unreleased Microsoft Windows Cluster Vista 2006, which they license on a per-processor basis. This advanced technology, developed by Microsoft, is what allows them to attain such mind-boggling customizability, scalability, and response time.
sites like vehix.com, orbitz.com, and finance.yahoo.com are essentially taking data from some goofy mainframe format (Reynolds & Reynolds, edgar, etc) and simply skinning it and making it searchable via the web. If those original database holders (data OEMs if you will) decide to plug in here, many of those sites just took a giant step toward redundancy.
I don't think such sites are kaput, because the retail experience holds something of value in and of itself (all the customer care bits). But Google gets a helluva lot more powerful, certainly.
davejenkins.com |
"Most types of items (such as products, services, housing, autos, wanted ads, jobs, travel, events, and news) automatically expire after 30 days. "
I'm kinda confused. Is this only referring to the actual commercial items being put up for sale, or is applying to most everything?
I was going to tell my fiancee about this and get her started on creating her own model horse database (she's a collector). I don't think it would be a good way to go if the above is true.
Could somebody clarify this for me and/or show me some sort of good out-of-the-box software that could be used in this way (collection of items, with pictures, description, etc.).
I only write this because it is likely to be missed.
And here I was reading the title thinking google had reached the nanotech age of enlightenment and launched itself into space like at the end of sim-earth.
Web Developers: Celebrate to our roots! Animated Gifs and Tiled Backgrounds, dont let our history die!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm in your google base. I'm killing your google mans!
I can imagine this becoming a great source of copyright issues - google you have no way of knowing where your content came from - pictures, reference articles - even recipes. For example it's really not hard to imagine someone posting up all the recipes from their Delia Smith cookbook collection.
Who is going to police all this aggregated, easily searched content? The only rational strategy for google is to wash their hands of it and have some kind of content editors responsible for acting on complaints.
Sure, this issue isn't exactly new to the internet, but by storing it, indexing it, making a tidy profit from it (via adwords) and no doubt painting a nice, publically available API over it, I find it hard to believe it won't be long before various organisations are up in arms.
The reason why Craigslist is so popular is the anonymous nature of the poster.
I'm seeing fields for quantities, expiration dates, descriptions, ... With a little more work and GooglePay integration this will be the GoogleBay.
Larry: I've been trying to infer structure from web pages all day, and boy are my arms tired!
... everything. Just by the example details you can tell it's poised to kill craigslist's classifieds.
Sergey: Hey Larry, what if we could trick our users into supplying structure along with their data?
Larry: Why, we would rule the world!
[Larry and Sergey burst into song...]
~
But seriously, this is way cool. Here's where Google Base could go from here:
1. Allow more complex data types (the AJAX interface is beautiful and simple, but really limiting... maybe allow more complex types to be built through an API?) I'm thinking of structures and some kind of instantiation system.
2. Publish a really rich library of types. What they've got right now is a good start, but more common types will prevent people from creating redundant and not-quite-identical types. For instance, if there had been a "Slashdot geek" category, we wouldn't all have had to create our own when we entered ourselves into the 'Base after reading this headline.
3. Allow data to be restricted to groups of users. Google already has concepts of users and groups, so this is a no-brainer... a few customized viewing pages, and it could replace Flickr, Blogs,
(about the subject title... my cat wrote it just now when he jumped onto my laptop, and it seemed as good as anything I was about to come up with)
gentlemen, with all the googling going on, we'll arrive at 3rd base in no time...
my blog
Think of this as a different API for the search application. Google base often points to data outside of google. The only requirement is that everyone labels their data and gives the labels to google.
Going through cars, there are pull down menus to select the year, price range, etc.. Previously, you could either 1- go to google.com and hope you get lucky or 2- Go to every listing service and do searches of their databases
The main advantage is that this gives access to the deep web or the hidden web. It gives the google user the ability to search databases that were previously invisibile.
I can't vouch for the other sites you mentioned, but Orbitz is considerably more than just skinning some static data feeds, and moreover isn't that mainframe-dependent these days. Check out this article by Paul Graham for more information. The pricing engine they use is by ITA Software, and it's actually quite complicated and compute-intensive.
The details here seem rather scant. What search algorithm? Is this just like a normal database search? Or is there any way data can be searched using something like PageRank?
Because if this is just a normal database, meh, I could do that myself. But if I could in some way define a group of webpages and then perform pagerank-intelligent searches within that group, that would be a lot more interesting.
Are people allowed to define new "kinds" of information to search for, or only new attributes? And is Google Base available through a Google API like interface? Because I don't see anything about that on the site right now.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I cannot find any porn. I think it is broken.
A brief search reveals some recipies reproduced from an external site. There is a link provided, but no indication what copyright the recipie is under; the same for a recipie copied from Wikibooks (a clear GFDL violation).
Apparantly you can link directly to a Google Base hosted image. This means basically free image hosting with virtually unlimited bandwidth. I wonder how long it will be until Google clamps down on this, if at all.
Here's an example.
Frankly, I'm more interested in when the API's come out for this thing. The kind of apps people will build that take advantage of this will be quite interesting. Hmm... Things might get pretty interesting pretty fast once the API's are out.
Dammit. I read the headline and was all exciting about Google launching the Copernicus Moon Base.
So disappointing.
I can't figure this out just from the info on the site, but is this the sort of thing that lets you search on attributes (AKA metadata)? If so, it's like an idea I started implementing a few years back, which (due to lack of time) never really materialized.
:-)
The idea was that you could do things like: suppose you're looking for a PDA with certain features; say, a keyboard, no more than $ 200, and at least 320x240 screen size. Then you would go to the site, select the item type, and add constraints by selecting attributes from a list, then a relation on that attribute (e.g. equals, or greater than), and then select or enter a value. You would keep adding constraints until all of the ones important to you where there, and then click search.
The idea was to let any interested party add information to the system; "many eyes" would make sure that it was mostly accurate. I wasn't really sure this would work, but Wikipedia later went and kind of proved the viability of it. In the meantime, I had gotten the user interface and database backend to a usable state, but lacked the time to add all sorts of item types, including sensible metadata, and enter some sample information to kick start the system.
Nowadays, I just wait for Google to implement my ideas.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
While the semantic web people are arguing forever about ontologies and schemas Google go ahead and implement a practical way of adding meaningful metadata which real people can actually use.
Instead of having strict schemas which will never be quite right you can just add whatever attribute you like and see which attributes are popular for the type of entity you are entering.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
So.. the Google Base is.. Goog Al Qaeda?
In five years, Google will sell you CPU time to run your algorithms on their servers, connected to the largest well-organized database in the worlds, which updates itself in real-time from all over the world with RSS feeds.
:)
You first read it here
A random search reveals a new aspect to Google's business operations: http://base.google.com/base/items?oid=152787692968 78035551
Who needs websites when all of the worlds information is nicely organized with meta information in a single database? How long do you think it'll be before google imports all of wikipedia? They're allready trying to import all books and tv shows. And once they get GooglePay hooked in, and everyone can buy and sell anyything through a google base type of interface... what will happen to amazon? Google is taking over the internet slowly but surely. If I were Gates, I'd be pissing in my pants.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
I just tired it, and you can jump in too. The water is fine! No expiration, ten images, no charge, searchable via Google. eBay had a good run. The use is, of course, to sell and buy stuff. There are other applications, but they won't be the important ones at first.
(||) Nehmo (||)
Aw, I read that as "Google Bass" then. I knew something fishy was up.
I've got the spirit, lose the feeling.
First time ever posting to /. :
Despite all the criticism and ramifications this has on privacy concerns (as far as interally housed infromation on intranets etc.). I personaly think it's a good motivator for organzations to ensure that strionger measures are taken to protect information that is NOT intended to disseminated.
I find it easy enough to find as much information as I want or need - even with my limited technical backround. Granted, as much is already out there for the picking of almost anyone who is willing to put enough effort into it. But by exposing this same information through such a visible and prominent medium as Google, wouldn't it be a benefit a greater majority to be aware of what others (possibly with potnential malicus intent) could so easily be aware of?
Just my own alcohol-induced opinion anyway.
Any notice that when you search for porn on google base it gives one of the results as a link to slashdot? http://base.google.com/base/search?q=porn&authorid =&hl=en
We'll host the items and make them searchable for free." Emphasis mine. I might be reading too much into this, but I reckon they work with a company that rhymes with boogle. ;)
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
``Hmm... Things might get pretty interesting pretty fast once the API's are out.''
Speaking of which...has Google already released the specifics of their Google Talk protocol?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I wrote a specification for something nearly identical to Google Base a few years ago. And our engineers are working on it. A form of universal database that blends symentic web concepts with AJAX. I am not sure if your project was just a hobby or not, but ours is a serious commercial venture. But where Google have pulled the rug from under everyone (Yahoo included) is in the fact their service is free. So, even if we come up with something better, we may not be able to charge for it.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
A stretch, but I like it. When do the Crusades start?
how does search algorithm work for content on base? They are not necessarily linked to each other!
I am guessing this the first flop from google.
Every time Google comes out with a new product, you people talk about how great it is and highlight the product as a category killer. However, it increasingly appears to me that Google is filling up holes in their offering, in an attempt to match its competitors so called yahoo ,MSN etc...
Google does innovate in some spaces but has largely innovated in order to gain entry in markets that already existed. As a rule of thumb, they've been very smart at breathing new innovations in those markets. However, their competitors are generally quick to notice and are catching up.
My Dec wishlist from "oo"(g"oo"gle +yah"oo") guys is :
# An audio search engine, which will include a podcasting component (and possibly a podcast authoring component via blogger)
# A strategic partnership with Wikipedia or some other encyclopedia
# Some type of clustered search offering
# A calendar product, which will probably inject new life in that space
# An auction offering, tied with an internal payment system
this will make these guys own the whole web ....lol
Perfect! ...just like Religion with a capital R.
The question is, will G, like God, be homogenized to the point that the authentic experience (the authentic Tikka Masala) gets absolutely buried by compromises made to mass produce the religion. There are more recipes out there than I care to search, more inane religious ceremonies and false prophets than I care to wade through. I suppose I feel Google's quality metric, the referencing thing, may not suffice to meet MY personal needs.
Is this the beginning of the end for internet dating companies?
Will it be possible to put creative commons stuff online and then refer to it from a web interface via the google API? And will it be possible to dump the entire database to flat file for offline use?
I think the creative commons is easy to have - just an "license" attribute.
Google alredy has nice APIs for Java, Perl, PHP and .NET. My bet is that someone eventualy will come up with a JDBC compatible interface, and start using GoogleDB as a traditional database engine just for the sake of doing it!
I was already wondering uses for an online, searcheable, public avaliable database. And there are dozens... One for example is to make every post on my blog indexed by Google, an online store would benefect from this by posting their itens on the database, and get some eventually showing up on froogle.
Imagine posting the CDDB database into GoogleDB... Or creating a free Thesaurus tool that can be updated online... Almost every site that offers some kind of free information can use GoogleDB!
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
Is Java powering this whole thing? Or is it like their support software written in Python?
They could have done this already with their main index using normal HTML and microformats. Yet it seems Google aren't very keen on HTML at all. They don't write valid HTML for their websites, they don't use standard HTML links in GMail (making it impossible to, say, open an email in a new tab), they ignore HTML semantics when spidering websites (e.g. you can rank keywords appearing within <h1> elements as relatively more important than the rest of the page).
It's true that HTML offers relatively little semantic information compared with domain-specific formats. However it does offer some useful information, and since HTML is a very flexible and extensible format, a hell of a lot more can be added with microformats, while staying compatible with all the other HTML software already in use. Why don't Google work with current formats instead of splitting things off this way?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
and then it crashes!
Vijay Kiran
I blog, therefore I am.
They already have - witness the three way search engine war between Google, MSN and Yahoo! Okay, so no blood is being spilt, but it's definitely a fight.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
It's worth noting that Google Base, among other things, duplicates core ebay functionality (listings for sale of goods and services), free of charge, as is the Google way.
Go Google!
http://base.google.com/base/items?oid=191251868817 2890858
In theory, with all the editorial mistakes and dupes, that we all know and love, the only thing that's really holding everything together is the community.
;)
;)
You make that sound as if it's a little thing. Slashdot is all about the community. If I want news (and I do), I read other sites - Ars, The Register, heise, and others (freshmeat comes to mind for the Linux geeks). If I wanted to know stuff even faster (and I don't), I guess I'd subscribe to a million blogs. Anyway, Slashdot certainly isn't about the news, it probably makes for one of the worst news outlets ever. But Slashdot has a one of a kind community. It's mostly just really, really large, which entails that there are a lot of idiots in there, but a few smart people, too, and usually a real expert on every issue. The news stuff is really just a way to make a substantial percentage of those people focus on a single issue. I think posting random computer-related topics from Wikipedia would accomplish much the same - and in all likelihood it would still be news more often, too.
Sorry for going on a wild tangent here, I sometimes feel like I have to justify why I'm still reading Slashdot after such a long time.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
And I suppose Sergey will be raping little boys soon?
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
"Google!" could possibly be the equivalence of a babys first spoken word for a netbased synthetic intelligence...
Funny considering the origin of the name but think about other implications and consequences. And is it intentional? One might almost begin to think so.
this comment is provided "as is" and without any express or implied legibility or congruity [...]
Note that Google base doesn't allow me to leave feedback on the seller. ebay and Amazon seem to have better fraud detection. After all online shopping is a matter of trust.
it's 2:18 am.
Your clock is slow. The post says 02:26AM. You should use NTP..
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
Google seems to give a stab at reinventing Lotus Notes/Domino.
Either that, or he's posting mysteriously from 8 minutes in the past!
Perhaps he set a timer. Or, even more mysterious, perhaps he's travelling substantially slower than we are, thus putting him behind!
On the other hand, his NTP might just be experiencing 480000ms lag. My condolences, I was on modem for a long time too.
I was left with the impression that Google Base would only gather meta-information, to better describe web resources already indexed by Google.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
Power corrupts...
It never requires corrupt people, but the very essense of power is a corrupting influence. This would happen even in a big organisation comprised of mahatma's
Do no evil is all good and well, but lets just wait for the subpoenas (or what if the googlebot uncovers data in its searches or databases or e-mails that fits a definition of "suspicious activity"? is inaction an option for google in this instance?
Rich Gentlemen Hide - The Existential Comic
So I tried again with another set of random chars with the same result.. so I thought wtf?! Its my item, I decide what it is called and how it should be spelled!
So for fun I tried again with 'wtf' and strangely it was accepted and I was presented with a new screen titled 'wtf - edit item'
'lol' is also accepted by 'lmao' is not..
Well thats the extent of my scientific research so far on this issue.
damn.. I misspelled my random chars.. 'sdfgsd' does work 'adfgsd' doesnt.. where is the sense in this?
What's next??? A FREE Google operating system???????
:)
We can only dream
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
In Soviet Russia all your base... are fully searchable?
What idiot modded that flaimbait?
It answers the question with the answer shown right on the Google Base submission page!
...All your base are belong to us
Go look Arkwright up (Industrial Revolution). They're changing everything.
You see, people don't really want computers, they just want the services they provide.
Deleted
It would be nice if they got one product to work FIRST, then launched another.
You always have to think that nothing comes for free! Obviously google will want to use all the informations you store there. Do you really believe you can trust google and store your corporate informations on their servers. Google will start to know everything: Your search habits, your email contacts (via gmail) and now your favourite recipies. It's great for them, they can now make the perfect customer profiling out of all the data you store on their servers!
As people like to say: Trust is good, control is better
Steve's come pretty close - what if his chair had hit someone? ;)
which is totally what she said
wouldnt he have to be travelling really fast so that time slows down for him? Maybe he's been travelling in his warp capable craft and the clock hasnt accounted for the space-time effects of light-speed (or greater than light, teehee) travel. Or he's just floating around in space somewhere 8x60 light seconds away. Yus
which is totally what she said
As far as google base competing with eBay or craigslist, what I want to know is... Whats to stop people from using both eBay *and* google base?
:D
I just went through a test run on google base, and all of this seems to work perfectly and not be against any rules. When you make a google base entry, you can choose to have anyone finding your listing in their search results be forwarded to the page of your choosing, containing information about your recipe/car part/job/interesting hangnail.
As of now, you pay no fee for google base, and there is no framework that creates an obligation to buy or sell anything. So, after creating your eBay listing, what's to stop you from creating an identical google base listing, and then have it direct people to your eBay ad? A second free source of visitors!
Sounds pretty good to me
Now, try to immagine a Wiki engine powered by Google Base. No matter where your site is, or how new it is, it will have access to hundreds, thousands of searcheable nodes!
This Google Base can start a revolution on information sharing.
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
Does anyone remember bitlocker that tried to do an on-line database?
They went out of business, not enough revenues. But then, Google is looking to compliment their product offerings, not base their company around on-line database.
I expect there will be a resurgence of on-line databases now that Google has announced their offering in this space. I'll bet that one year from now, Yahoo, AOL, and Amazon, will buy one of those companies for $$$ to keep up with Google. Regards,... Fred
Life is NP-Complete
Certainly the right path as far as "global information repository" schema's go but it seems a bit risky to centralize the meta data. Can't we frankenstein together a universal distributed meta data db (ie. via the headless p2p protocol du jour) that points to where everything is on the web?
because all our base are yours.
What if the article I wish to publish addresses the problem of child pornography? Guess what, when I tried posting said article, I got an error: "word not allowed: child pornography".
A huge database filled with documents and key-value pairs... it's... it's... Lotus Notes!
because all our base are belong to your.
Someone should just say, "This is another way of organizing the world's data."0 159561368/ that is the worst looking Chicken Tikka Masala I have ever seen."
Someone else should say, "of course not everyone will know how to use it, not everyone knows how to really use Google for a regular web search."
Someone else should say, "Seems like a type of Blogger for a specific purpose or a message board without the option to reply."
And finally someone else should say, "http://base.google.com/base/items?oid=1581961720
To which everyone will reply "how many Chicken Tikka Masala have you ever seen and what is a Chicken Tikka Masala??"
Google has the example of recipes in their easy documentation, but google base doesn't really seem suited to this or any non-volatile use. All the data expires after 30 days. It looks as if you can restore it, but that isn't completely clear from the UI.
If I were creating an online recipe database I surely wouldn't want it to expire every 30 days nor would I want to have to remember to go restore it every 30 days.
No, it seems to me that this is what people in the financial community were saying it was -- an eBay killer in its first stages. It lets people list products and services for sale, for free, and encourages the purchase of adwords ads to promote the items.
What will obviously happen is that 5000 people will list a similar item, then some of them will buy adwords ads to promote their listings. Most of those who do this will end up losing money because the adwords ads will cost more than they end up making on the product, but in the meantime Google will have made a bunch of cash.
Then, a future version, after they get critical mass, will add user ratings, etc. and they'll end up being a major eBay competition. Then they'll probably offer a payment service and other ways to monetize the whole thing.
They may also fork it (metaphorically speaking) and end up providing a categorized non-volatile or semi-volatile database for other item types (for example, controlling the volatility based on item type, number of accesses and user rating, etc.).
But the big push here has to be to make money by evolving into an eBay killer.
There used to be a nice price compare site called Killer App that was much like you describe. It was limited to computer hardware, mostly; not sure if they actually had PDAs (though it wouldn't have been out of place). But they did let you do similar things with monitors (size, try, resolution, etc), motherboards (socket, chipset), etc. I was sad to see it go, I haven't seen quite its equal.
I hope that Yahoo and MSN and whomever don't start doing this. Then we will be back to the olden days of submitting pages to every search engine.
Perhaps we need a standard. A protocol for submitting data to an index, and a central repository for those submissions. Web sites could submit to this index, then search engines could subscribe to it to build an index.
All your base are belong to Google.
You think Google is bad now in their crusades? Just wait until Google and Wal-Mart go at it in the apocalypse!
If the two ever merge, there will be enough power to overthrow national governments (Wal-Mart already overpowers local governments).
Cheesy Movie Night
How long until we see some sort of Spanish Inquisition?
"In the game of life, someone always has to lose. To me, if life were fair, that someone would always be Oklahoma." -DKR
Honestly, eBay may be in the targets, but I think it will attack Monster and CareerBuilder first. Think about the local search angle, and how you'd attack the (somewhat entrenched) recruiting market right now.
I forget what 8 was for.
"all your Base are belong to us."
(%i1) factor(777353);
(%o1) 777353
I don't know why I haven't seen someone pointing this out, but this is obviously a response to the popularity of Craiglists. I think it's a very smart move by Google.
check it out, you may find it useful
My tech blog
"Google Friends"??
That seals it for me.
This is cult worship.
> When do the Crusades start?
6:30pm Thursday at Sergey's place. Don't forget your helmet and coconut shells. Brownies and gruel will be provided.
You're forgetting that data isn't free---and nobody will just "give" it to google just for the fun of having them host it. Data is expensive.
I'm pretty certain Yahoo pays a -ton- for their finance website data.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
Now...what happens when some stupid sod uploads his customer database, complete with billing information (e.g., credit card numbers and expiry dates)?
..but it's oriented to indexing real-life objects rather than abstract information, and has less rights to allow to see parts of the information to certain individuals (it's either all public or all private).
Still, in it's principles, it's similar to this idea:
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Profemaile
Short description
Imagine a simple website, where you could login, and then create your profile by creating custom fields (questions and answers). The answers could be anything from plain text to uploadable documents (photo, audio/video file, other kind of documents). In other words, you could simply ADD new fields of any type to your profile... Then, you could let prefered people and groups see the fields you prefer, you could also request fields from other people just by writing a question or using a question from another profile.
End of Short description
Yes, it seems it's likely someone on /., a Masters degree in CS with too much time on his hands. Well, apparently, souls are now for sale on Google Base. His soul is apparently worth slightly more than 2 cents to him. The philosophical questions raised by such a sale are numerous (as the parent has mentioned), but I took the shortcut and reported it to Google Base as a nonsaleable item, and a misleading post at that. Interestingly, GOogle Base would be a great place to hook up with the baser sort...
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
it just has to be said: "all your base are belong to us"
-- i'm not paranoid. who told you that???
Seriously, how long do you think this will take?
Also, this could become an excellent place for FreeDB/Gracenote type services. Once default schemas are agreed upon by general usage, this thing could really take off for this type of data.
Nothing to see here.
I'm there! Oh, wait, food brownies. Never mind.
The problem with them creating content (letting users post jobs, etc..) and providing a search is like them spitting in their own bucket. Google is selling keyword ads. Let say for jobs in chicago. Now I"m paying google 3$ for every click. At the same time google is now competing with me on my own turf by allowing job postings in Chicago. Google has now become my competitor. Why would I pay them 3$ for every click, I"m giving money to my competitor by supporting their services. The only way that this will work for google is that people will outway the benefits of these keywords ads ie that their keyword ads work. Imho I don't think the ROI pays off. I don't remember ever clicking on an ad link and then buying something. Therefore I believe google's stock is way over valued, and we are going to think of this era as the google bomb.
When will the Google subscriptions begin?
No references to Google Grid or Googlezon yet? Come on, people!
Real_men_don't_need_spacebars.
Exactly. Slashdot still has some level of humor and cutting edge technology. The news slant just helps focus the community around a topic. Nobody can really expect
Does this mean that all my base are belong to google?
When microsoft invades yahoo.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Google Base seems very unstructured on the surface. It looks like you just throw some text out into cyberspace and it is immediately stored and indexed in the google search engine. I presume these texts could be anything like in want-ads: buy-sell, personals, announcements, discussions. This reminds me a free-form craigs-list.
As with anything else in cyberspace, once its there, its probably there forever, and easily discoverable by google. So I'd be careful.
on Nov 5, according to the Creative Commons site, Google started providing a search that let you find content filtered according to what rights/permissions are bound to the content.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
One of the most entertaining part of craigslist is to read the personals. It happens to free unlike most other services. And there are alias for semi-anonymonity.
I think this is a wonderful idea to get the user to submit metadata, namely give them free storage and bandwidth. My concern with this, though, is that there will be no way for the general public to access that metadata once Google has it other than through a webpage (with or without Google ads on it) in an attempt to protect its interests. Others have discussed their excitement over the thought of an API to access Google Base, but I wonder if they would provide a 2-directional api. Sure, they'll eventually provide an API to submit information, but will they provide one to pull information out? Would that go against their interests, namely to sell ads? Perhaps they will, but limit the number of queries one API key can do, as they do with the other APIs?
It would appear that this (GBase) is a direct competitor to Craigslist. Does this mean the end of CL? I hope not.
Interesting. Upload descriptions of all the junk you want to sell next!
ebay needs a worthy competitor.
it says it accepts ANY TYPE OF DATA
but theres no way to upload anything other than images..
what if you have a HUGE MANUAL in pdf or something, you dont wanna have to past 5 megs of text into that stupid description box
I guess they should check that all of their variable tags actually have values before publishing.
Not A Sig
If they host everything, and it's better than all the websites that host their own info in order to run advertisements, then those websites will disappear with time.
The sites may disappear, but will the content?
Or will content creators simply move from a model where they have to run all their own infrastructure to one where Google does it for them for free?
If those original database holders (data OEMs if you will) decide to plug in here, many of those sites just took a giant step toward redundancy.
But the "data OEMs" don't WANT the middleman sites like Vehix.com or Orbitz.com to go away. Those are their paying customers.
Data OEMs are B2B (business-to-business) companies. To migrate their offerings to Google Base would mean they'd have to become B2C (business-to-consumer) companies as well.
Actually, the comments really help in determining whether the story is credible or in finding background information on the subject. It's a great supplement and the stories are often useful on their own.
Don't forget the jokes. That's what got me hooked on slashdot when I first did. I still mainly read it for the jokes.
Darl: Take off every 'GPL'. For great lawsuit.
for all the "al-Qaida means 'the base' in Arabic" and "All your base are belong to us" jokes?
utter rubbish
As soon as the Muslims attack...
THis would be a good buy, if I could search for all of the souls, and buy as many of them at one time as possible. I'd like to see a similar buying and selling ability for various types of commodities on Google Base, or I guess that would be Google Soul Stock Market.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
hmm...
I volunteer to bring Cookies! (capital "c")
Your impression of Catholicism is a tad skewed, my friend.
As far as google base competing with eBay or craigslist, what I want to know is... Whats to stop people from using both eBay *and* google base?
:D
I just went through a test run on google base, and all of this seems to work perfectly and not be against any rules. When you make a google base entry, you can choose to have anyone finding your listing in their search results be forwarded to the page of your choosing, containing information about your recipe/car part/job/interesting hangnail.
As of now, you pay no fee for google base, and there is no framework that creates an obligation to buy or sell anything. So, after creating your eBay listing, what's to stop you from creating an identical google base listing, and then have it direct people to your eBay ad? A second free source of visitors!
Sounds pretty good to me
Is it me or does it seem like Google is average 1 new service/product every 2 months or so. This is a scary pace.
Why is it scary? I think it's great. They have a corporate attitude of "Boy, that's a neat idea, Bob - why don't you see if you can make it work?" instead of "Shutup Bob - stop being a troublemaker."
Sure some of them will fail, but Google will evolve a rich product set.
Maybe if you're Microsoft it's scary, but I can't see who else should be scared.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)