Google have launched another new product – Google Base – a place for submitting content. I’m still trying to get my head around so here’s how they describe it themselves:
‘Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content that we’ll host and make searchable online. You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle, Google Base and Google Local.’
One of the keys to Google Base as I see it is the ‘attributes’ feature (looks a lot like ‘tags’ to me).
Content seems to last a maximum of 31 days
The content already submitted includes reviews, car sale ads, recipes etc
They have the ability to upload content a page at a time or many pages at once – and it seems via RSS. What is uploaded can end up in Google’s main index, Froogle or Google Local depending what it is. I’m interested in the RSS feature but a little unsure why anyone would want to upload large amounts of information in this way if they already have a feed being published elsewhere.
A few other questions spring to mind that I can’t see answers to yet in their FAQs.
- How will the index these pages in the normal Google index. Will they be ranked highly quickly? Will this crowd out SERPS?
- How long will it take for spammers to find ways to manipulate this? It seems to be that Google is almost inviting it. Could the new sploggerss be sBasers?
- How long they’ll slap their own Adsense ads on them :-)
I can see how people without a website might find Google Base useful in getting their message out – but I need to dig around a bit more before I can really comment on it and how it might be used for or by bloggers and how it might impact us.
update – I’ve just tried adding a page and am waiting for it to be processed (15-60 minutes is the wait apparently). The page I made was a ‘people profile’ and it was pretty easy to make – a matter of filling in feilds (or deleting ones I didn’t want). I could add a picture and a variety of sets of information including a URL to a website. I’ll show you my page here when it goes live.
The only problem with it was that as with AdWords, AdSense and Analytics Google seems to be having trouble keeping me logged in with my Google ID (which is neccessary to use Google Base). It keeps automatically signing me in with an old ID that they previously asked me to change. This is quite frustrating and I can’t seem to rectify it even with deleting cache/cookies etc.
Another small issue – it won’t let you publish anything with a lable this isn’t spelt ‘right’ – I tried to add ‘ProBlogger’ and ‘Darren Rowse’ as a lable and it wouldn’t allow it. I had to apply for an exemption which was going to take a manual approval from a Google staffer before it would allow me to go live with the page.
update II – Well that’s a surprise – my page is up afte just 3 minutes. You can see it here.
Be a bit gentle with me – I put it together in two minutes (I guess that says something about ease of use) and copy and pasted the description from my linkedin profile.
update III – more ‘discoveries’:
– html code is not possible. This means no formatting, no links etc. I guess this helps cut down on spam.
– no RSS feeds to track tags. This would be a useful addition.
– InsideGoogle reports that some words seem to be banned and are changed. They write:
‘That means that my article, by listing the banned items, was unfit for publication. Read it, and you’ll notice that “mod chips” has been replaced by “modification chips”, “cable descramblers” is “cable box descramblers” and “fake documents” is “falsified documents”. Additionally, I had to remove the exclamation point from my title.’
Others are writing about Google Base at:
– Search Engine Watch – Google Base
– CJ Online – New Google service allows anyone upload most anything to a publicly searchable database
– Danny Ayers – Google Base RDF Lite Solo
– Google’s Blog – First Base
– The Kelsey Group – Google Base Is Live
– John Battele’s Search Blog – All Your Base Are Google, The Launch
