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.
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
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?
Yeah but it'll be a government running Linux!
... 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?
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 |
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)
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.
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.
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.