Vnunet.com analysis: Google Base goes far beyond an Ebay competitor

The mystery Google project called Google Base is likely to be something very different from the Ebay competitor that has been widely predicted, industry analysts have told vnunet.com.

It is more likely that Google is planning to create a vast database for all kinds of information that software developers can use to power their applications, suggested Whit Andrews, a research vice president covering web services for Gartner. 

"If it were me, I would be creating an online database such that that online database could feed other online applications," Andrews told vnunet.com.

Such a database could allow amateur meteorologists, for example, to share weather data that they collect, which a software developer could use to create an application that helps farmers plan when to harvest their crops.

Bird watchers could mark which birds they saw when, and that data could be used for scientific research. Andrews cautioned that he has no special knowledge of Google's plans and only based his ideas on the screenshots that started circulating online on Tuesday.

The screenshots in question showed a forthcoming Google product dubbed Google Base. The page displayed a service that asked individuals to "post" information to one of numerous categories such as vehicles.

The phrasing in part suggested that the service would be used as an online classified service that would compete with Ebay. Speculation was further fuelled by earlier unconfirmed reports that Google is looking to create a service called Google Wallet, a payment service that could compete with Ebay's Paypal.

Both bloggers and mainstream media including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal jumped on the news. Some wrongly predicted that the product would be unveiled on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Google was quick to counter the speculation.

"We are testing new ways for content owners to easily send their content to Google. Like our web crawl and the recently released Google Sitemaps program, we are working to provide content owners with an easy way to give us access to their content. We're continually exploring new opportunities to expand our offerings, but we don't have anything to announce at this time," a spokesperson for the company said in an emailed statement.

"I believe this is Google’s way to not only build a lucrative listings business, but also to flesh out other areas like Froogle and Local with deep content that’s otherwise inaccessible or just plain doesn’t exist," Charlene Li, principal analyst for devices, media and marketing at Forrester Research wrote on her blog.

By offering content owners a way to provide Google with so-called structured data, the search engine can make such information available more easily. Structured data contains not only the information itself, but also information about the data.

The database that Li envisions, for instance, could allow employers to upload job openings, which Google could then present along with its search results. Over time this could mean the end of services that specialise in one one kind of offering, such as online jobs.

Both Li and Gartner's Andrews essentially talk about the same thing when they mention the database.

Google Base could do for so-called structured data what blogs did for the publishing industry: make it intuitively simple for anyone to create one, said Andrews.

Google Maps offers an early example of what happens when you make data freely available and allow developers to create new applications on top of that.

The website Housingmaps, for instance, did exactly that by linking apartment listing offered on Craigslist.org and organising them on a map.

"[Google could] let people mesh up any data that they can sent," argued Andrews.

He cautioned, however, that if Google was planning to create such a database service, that would form an "extraordinary ambition which would be far from assured."

It will take people years to think of ways to use the data and create the services that do so.

The company also currently doesn't have a business model that would allow it to make money from providing this enormous database. Because consumers will be accessing the actual data through third party applications, Google won't be able to put advertisement next to the text.

The search engine, however, could charge a fee to heavy data users and deliver them a guaranteed level of service, he suggested.