Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo notes that some folks in Europe caught a screen shot of Google Base, which looks to be a potential rival to eBay, before Google apparently took it down. It actually sounds like more than that from the description on the page: "Google Base is Google's database into which you can add all sort of content. We'll host your content and make it searchable online for free." It provides examples, from "listing of your used car for sale" to "database of protein structures."
Rumors surface on the big G and their plans to take on ebay with their own site for buyers and sellers.
[businessweek.com...]
[edited by: engine at 1:50 pm (utc) on Oct. 26, 2005]
[edit reason] Added quotes [/edit]
Google Inc. has unintentionally provided a sneak peek at what appears to be a looming expansion into classified advertising - a free service that might antagonize some of the Internet search engine's biggest customers, including online auctioneer eBay Inc.
[hosted.ap.org...]
[edited by: engine at 1:55 pm (utc) on Oct. 26, 2005]
[edit reason] link removed [/edit]
unintentionally provided a sneak peek
Hehe - love it.
Some of the best online marketing tactics I've ever seen have come from Google.
TJ
Sounds more like they want to BE the Internet. :)
According to the G mission statement, their "mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
A database like G Base seems like a neat way to get users to submit more of their information to the search engine and make it immediately and usefully available to people around the world.
Looking at it this way, G Base is not a direct competitor to eBay or Craigslist, G just wants more of the world's information available to Google users.
PHOENIX, AZ – Internet search engine giant Google Inc. announced Wednesday that it plans to locate a new product engineering and customer support...
This previously released article from a couple of weeks ago seems to hint to just this. [signonsandiego.com...]Actually, your article sounds like their putting some customer service reps in Phoenix.
The current Google search indexes the vast <i>unstructure</i> sea of information online. In Base, they talk about users defining attributes (think tags) when posting information. It is a build on the fly database table that can be customised for any application.
As the database grows, Google can start making links between everyone's custom attributes and providing a most robust search than just a text search. For example, show me all birthday's on April 2nd.
Yup, and next is the Travel Industry
[edited by: engine at 10:52 am (utc) on Oct. 28, 2005]
[edited by: engine at 10:54 am (utc) on Oct. 28, 2005]
[edit reason] No blogs, thanks. [/edit]
Looks like Google is taking another bite at ROR an XML format for indexing <b>structured</b> information.
[edited by: engine at 10:55 am (utc) on Oct. 28, 2005]
>>Is Google trying to be everywhere on the Internet?
Sounds more like they want to BE the Internet. :)
What is the Internet good at? It's good for bringing together widely scatter people together with widely scatter items, information, groups, etc. If you have a small set of one or the other, the web is of little use. It's handy, but it doesn't change the rules of the game.
Google is simply focusing on making the web do what it does, better: Linking scattered-about people with other scattered-about people who are looking for each other.
The travel example here is a good one. Several different sources of "cheap flights" brought together where people can find them.
The travel example here is a good one. Several different sources of "cheap flights" brought together where people can find them.
And wrecking a lot of travel sites, which do the same, in the process I suppose. I assume most of them will be toast soon.
I have no travel site or any other site resembling this btw. ;)
I think it's all a bit fast ... I can kinda follow G enthusiasm/business interest, but I kinda lost track after GMail [which btw provides excellent functionality] :) Maybe I am getting old.
What is the Internet good at? It's good for bringing together widely scatter people together with widely scatter items, information, groups, etc. If you have a small set of one or the other, the web is of little use. It's handy, but it doesn't change the rules of the game.
Just analysing:
The problem is that PI inflation of connecting sites [aka the once described above] dwarf any PI's of people actually writing producing all that content.
IE When I put my PhD on the web that took quite a couple of years to write and a lot of effort. Or someone writes 300 high quality pages on a new domain. Both cases have few chances to actually make reasonable money, but involve certainly more work than scraping the content and linking to it.
Google has, praise them, with adsense at least brought a wee chance of earning some return on that content investment. But we can ultimately only really get rid of spam if solid content pays as much or more than ripping loads of content off, you never worked on.
Spammers just recognised that concept and exploit it in various successful or unsuccessful variations.
There is a reason that libraries evolved in non net societies as people realised some intelligence has to go into indexing. Just picking the scroll that most people pointed to as it has the nicest cover and had many clever sounding words in it wasn't enough anymore.
So trust ranking evolved. etc etc .. We will see a repetition of age old society processes on the web. Wikipedia will collapse on the long run or adapt some form of government as large scale anarchy just doesn't work.
New society will be old society .. same species same problems, same solutions.
Thanks for ignoring this, flaming it etc, etc ;)
:-)
Sounds more like they want to BE the Internet.
Kaled.
