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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."
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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?
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 will still be a need for mySQL/SQL Server/other DB options for certain types of applications like forums, etc. However, you're 100% right, with an API the possibilities are endless in terms of what you could include in their indexing.
The one factor that will keep this happening is performance and speed. Adding an additional 2 hops for database content won't make much sense for web applications. I can't see replacing local network queries with external queries to Google's Base system. Good call though on the API.
Hagrin.com
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 |
Don't you see that it's not about being useful for joe average, but as a way for people to feed google pre-digested data feeds that describe their websites. This is a white hat search engine optimisation tool. And the fact that you can upload content using ftp to upload rss files just makes it a walk in the park. Really, too friggen easy.
;-)
The fact that I am thinking about uploading my local job site's content just so that i can actually search it is beside the point, right?
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.
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).
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.
> The one factor that will keep this happening is performance and speed.
The other (probably the most important) problem will be with legal options (like terms of use).