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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."
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
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.
Yeah but it'll be a government running Linux!
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.
... 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?
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!
Well, it would be the first oppressive regime that makes information easily available to its minions.
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.
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.
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.).
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
A random search reveals a new aspect to Google's business operations: http://base.google.com/base/items?oid=152787692968 78035551
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 (||)
A stretch, but I like it. When do the Crusades start?
They're already running our governments, or at least the people behind Google are.
They couldn't read our brains with their satellite beams, because we out-smarted them with our protective foil hats. Instead they created a puppet company to create a popular search engine, and now they wait for people to send in their thoughts so they can combine them with their satellite images and records of our email and shopping habits.
But I'm onto you! You won't catch me running your desktop search!
Is this the beginning of the end for internet dating companies?
Er, did you even bother reading their website? They use the Jabber protocol.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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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
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".
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
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
Darl: Take off every 'GPL'. For great lawsuit.
hmm...