A beta version of Google Base is now public. Bindu Reddy of Google blogs: “This beta version of Google Base is another small step toward our goal, creating an online database of easily searchable, structured information.”
The user experience isn’t all that inspiring and the current contents are pretty sparse. So far I’ve run across quite a bit of job-oriented stuff. Search for “Tablet PC” for instance. I’m not sure what I’d expect to see, but I know this isn’t it.
Aside from the underwhelming UI, there’s an “upload” feature which supports RSS formats. I guess you could upload your whole store inventory and then someone could be using local.google.com to find you and your product. I’m not sure how you’re supposed to manage the temporal nature of your data though. And there are so many businesses that have massive “virtual” inventories–and what’s going to happen here if they were all to post their complete catalogs? The Google Base could quickly turn to jibberish. There’s a big difference between products in store and orderable. Maybe there’s some automation here possible to keep the online data in sync with your actual feed items. Actually, it looks like there is a simple “expire” time associated with each item. That’s not going to scale well.
I guess the idea here it to encourage tagging of data so that Google can filter and sort through the data better. You still need a webpage to use it so it’s not like Google is going to be hosting more than snippets of your content that you provide. But again, what about timeliness of the data–at both ends. Does this help me if I’m looking for a product that’s just being released and only one or two companies actually really, really have it? Does this help me look for a car or a job where the staleness of data is a big, big problem? A salesman might want me to check and see if an item has already been sold, but I don’t want to.
Now, these issues aside. I don’t see any reason why Google shouldn’t try this. It’s beta after all. However, like a bunch of other listing services, the quality of the service is going to greatly depend on the quality of the posts. It’ll be interesting to see how this works out.