All your base really are belong to Google

I agree that this is back to the 90s stuff and predict its failure for much the same reasons. People who take up this offer will be locked inside a walled garden, away from the most interesting content, and steered, all the time, towards the kind of content that is conducive to the sale of ads. Sooner or later, they’ll get sick of it.

It’s sad, if not surprising, to see Google going this way. But AOL was pretty cool in 1990, and we all learned to live without it.

I think you are being a bit too harsh on Google here and I think you’re missing the bigger point about Google Base. The purpose is not to build a “walled garden” of content, it is to move web searching beyond the crude keyword phase. I took a look at the specs and documents for Google Base and it’s clear that a Google Base item is little more than a set of key-value pairs of data.

Why is this important? Let’s say that I want to search for all reviews written by “Eszter”. Using the existing search technologies, I have no way of getting just this data without creating extremely contorted and error-prone search queries. I can do these types of things within the walled gardens of sites like Amazon, but not across the Internet as a whole. Google Base is the first step in this direction. (“Give me all documents of type ‘review’ where author is ‘Eszter’.”)

With regard to your points about Google becoming a content portal – I just don’t buy it. It’s true that Google will host content for you, but if you’re already a web site owner, they make it pretty easy to tag your content with the appropriate key-value pairs and submit your stuff to also be searched in the catalog. If someone’s searching for all documents where I’m is the creator, I will probably want them to find my blog entries. If Google Base is like any of the other Google properties (search, Froogle, news, etc.), it’ll present the results and get out of the way. Unlike the portal players of the 1990’s, Google is not playing a lock-in game – it’s playing a ubiquity game. They’re not interested in hosting everyone’s content in a modern AOL – they’re interested in being the card catalog everyone uses to get to that content.

As for the privacy implications of Google Analytics… I don’t know about you, but Google already refers well over half the traffic to my website. I figure that without Analytics, they already have a good idea about how people get to my site. For me, the price of letting Google know how visitors navigate within my site is worth the benefit of more sophisticated logging tools. I also include a Flickr toolbar on every one of my pages, and I could care less whether Yahoo is doing the same.

FWIW, I think that the course listing pages for linear algebra disprove the walled garden theory:

http://base.google.com/base/search?q=&btnG=Search+Base&nd=1&scoring=r&us=0&a_n409=linear+algebra&a_y409=0&a_s409=0&a_r=1

I can refine the search and report bad items, but everything else seems to punt me to MIT’s pages instead of a Google page hosting MIT content.

Oh no! Google has removed the link and the search term from post #4!!!

i for one welcome our new geek overlords.

also:good point, andrew. there is no such thing as openness without spam and porn creeping in there.

Submit [your information] to Google! Resistance is futile!

Remember: “The Base” is just English for Al Qaeda. And you still believe in coincidences….

PS. If you don’t get the title of this post…

What you say?!

(Sigh, come on persons!)

One or two people around me have floated the idea of search-as-public-utility; that is, using some sort of decent search is becoming an important part of productivity and public debate, and also that having so many people rely on a closed system to choose what they see gives that system a worrying amount of power (Murdoch press passim).

Would true conservatives countenance the fiscal rape of their children and grandchildren?

One thing the Bush Administration clearly has been very good at is focusing the attention of the press (and by extension the American people) on issues that they want to highlight. This has had the effect of advancing the Bush agenda, but has had the added effect of deflecting focus away from things that the Administration does not want to highlight. One of those issues is clearly the rampant, runaway spending of your tax dollars by Bush and the Republican majority congress. At this point there can be no doubt that, as they try to focus your attention on issues like stem cells and Supreme Court nominations, Bush and the Republican Congress are spending us all into a hole from which it will take us, our children and our grandchildren years to recover.

You don’t need to take my word for this, nor the words of any democrat or Bush-hater. You need only to read what conservatives like George Will are saying, or the people at conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. The Cato Institute recently completed a report on the spending habits of all US presidents during the last 40 years. If you’re interested in reading the report I’ve included a link at the end of this post.

If you want to continue to believe that Bush and Congressional Republicans are “on your side” or if you care only about saving stem cells and banning gay marriage perhaps you should read no further. But if you’re interested in the truth and are concerned about your financial well-being and that of your children, perhaps you should read on. Here’s some of what the Cato Institute report had to say about presidential spending over the last 40 years:

All presidents presided over net increases in spending. As it turns out George W. Bush is one of the biggest spenders of them all. In fact he is an even bigger spender than Lyndon B. Johnson in terms of discretionary spending.

The increase in discretionary spending in Bush’s first term was 48.5% in nominal terms. That’s more than twice as large as the increase in discretionary spending during Clinton’s entire 2 terms (21.6%) and higher than Lyndon B. Johnson’s entire discretionary spending spree (48.3%).

Adjusting the budget trends for inflation Bush looks even worse; his spending rate is much higher then Lyndon Johnson’s. In other words, Bush expanded federal non-entitlement programs in his first term almost twice as fast each year as Lyndon Johnson did during his entire presidency.

George W. Bush is the biggest spending president of the last 40 years in both the defense and discretionary spending categories by a long shot. He beats Johnson by almost 4% in defense spending growth and more than 3% in domestic discretionary spending growth.

And conservative columnist George Will points out that in his column today that federal spending has grown twice as fast under President Bush and congressional Republicans as under President Clinton. And with respect to the argument that this profligacy is related to 9/11 and homeland security, Will and the conservative think tanks have noted that over 65 percent of the spending increase is unrelated to national security.
Will further reports that Congressional Republicans (who achieved their majority by promising fiscal discipline) have presided over an orgy of pork spending with your tax dollars the likes of which have never been seen before. In 1991, the 546 pork projects in the 13 appropriation bills cost $3.1 billion. In 2005, the 13,997 pork projects cost $27.3 billion.

You may support Bush and the congressional Republicans because of some vague promise of “progress” on social issues with which you and the Republicans agree. In that case perhaps you are entitled to refer to yourself as a “social conservative.” But nobody who calls themselves a fiscal conservative could support Bush and the Republican Congress who are spending your tax dollars in an orgy of profligacy the likes of which has not been experienced in our lifetimes. You can continue to deny yourself this truth, but be assured that true conservatives know the truth. Bush and the Republican Congress are asking you to mortgage their futures and the futures of their children and grandchildren in exchange for soft “promises” on social issues. You are justifying the fiscal rape of your children and grandchildren perpetrated by your “moral” leaders in exchange for a vague promise of gains on social issues. Do yourself and your kids a favor; look them in the eye and explain to them why you have chosen to saddle them with these financial burdens, explain to them your reasoning. Then look in the mirror and explain to yourself how you can continue to support the people who you know in your heart are screwing you and to your kids. Is that morality? Is that conservatism?

Read the whole Cato article here:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/tbb/tbb-0510-26.pdf

Read the Will column here:
http://www.suntimes.com/output/will/cst-edt-geo17.html

The corrective factor in this is that when content is manipulated for commercial gain, it loses relevance. And the latter is figured out rather quickly.

The point I was trying to make with respect to the privacy implications regarding Google is they’re not unique in what they’re doing and people seem to single out Google, when they are doing the exact same thing everyone else is doing. For example, are you as concerned about the privacy implications of people adding Flickr content on their own sites? The inclusion of any sort of content from remote sites (from client-side Javascript, to images, to nifty Flash utility movies) is just as capable as serving as a tool to tear down the veil of users’ privacy as Google Analytics.

Given their search marketshare, is Google uniquely suited to build detailed user profiles? Absolutely. Are they any more uniquely suited to do this than any company that interacts with users in the form of search services, e-mail, photo sharing, and so on? I don’t think so. Maybe I’m just being naive, but as an Internet company, Google has a history of being a better citizen than its previous counterparts. I fully expect Google to create some sort of user profile of me based on my online activities and searches. I also expect that they’ll use that data to advertise to me in the form of text ads in their site. That’s the unfortunate reality of dealing with commercial search engines. However, given that the switching cost in selecting search engines is so low, Google also understands that if they become obnoxious and degrade the quality of their service, I’ll abandon them for someone who doesn’t. Just like how I switched from Altavista to Google in the first place. That’s the fundamental fact that led to their success and I think they’re smart enough to recognize that “do no evil” is the reason that they’re so popular to begin with.

Regarding my theory about disproving the walled garden theory, you’re right that the service has only been available a few days. However, in those few days, I have used it to submit my own and find others’ content. In my own personal experience using the site, it’s clear that Google is not attempting to build a walled garden within Google Base. Furthermore, Google Base is not a Craig’s List competitor, a replacement for online recipe books, or anything like that. It’s a simple structured metadata entry and search engine that allows users to add metadata to the engine for content that already exists on the web in addition to providing hosting for content not yet on the web.

Google Base may be become a building block for Google branded services that compete with some of these other services, but at the moment it’s just a catalog. The people at Craigs List (or any other classifieds “competitor”) could (if they were smart) put their own listings on Google Base and popup just the same as everything else when someone does a search for “find me a bicycle for $50 in NYC”. Not only would they expose their stuff to people using their own site, they’d capture the additional audience using Google Base. (If you do a car search on the site now, you’ll notice that auto vendors are doing exactly that.)

So with all due respect, the view that Google is building AOL 2.0 or trying to kill Craig’s List is entirely missing the point of Google Base. Google Base is not a new marketplace or a new place to post classified ads any more than a MySQL database engine is an online store. Google Base is the first step towards the next generation of search engines. The purpose of Google Base is not to compete with or displace the industries like the classified ads business – the purpose is to unify the content in these specific niches under a single search engine that can be used to search them all. The purpose of Google Base is not to bring all this content under a Google umbrella, rather it is to move the art of searching beyond the crude language of “show me all pages that contain the keyword ‘foo'” to a more natural and useful language of “show me all records of books authored by ‘Jack’ that were published between 1936 and 1945”.

Is there value in gobbling up Craigs List’s and others’ content and classified listings? Absolutely. Is it as valuable as being the central point where people use structured queries to find information? Not even close. Being the world’s content “card catalog” is immensely more valuable.