Google Base to Launch

Reports are out that Google Base will be launching soon, perhaps even today. Dirson has a screen shot up on Flickr and additional images are on Wouter Schut’s blog.

Google Base appears to be a service to publish content directly to google and have them host it in a centralized way. If so, this would be going completely against the accelerating trend of decentralized publishing.

My prediction: when the dust settles, this will either be largely ignored or universally hated. Centralized content is boring…so much is going on at the edge of the web, why would anyone try to put it all back in the center?

Philipp Lenssen has more details, including the text from the screen shot below:

Post your items on Google.

Google Base is Google’s database into which you can add all types of content. We’ll host your content and make it searchable online for free.

Examples of items you can find in Google Base:

• Description of your party planning service
• Articles on current events from your website
• Listing of your used car for sale
• Database of protein structures

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 and Google Local.

UPDATE: Tom Oliveri, Product Marketing Manager at Google, has posted a short note about Google Base on the Google blog:

You may have seen stories today reporting on a new product that we’re testing, and speculating about our plans. Here’s what’s really going on. We are testing a new way for content owners to submit their content to Google, which we hope will complement existing methods such as our web crawl and Google Sitemaps. We think it’s an exciting product, and we’ll let you know when there’s more news.

Thanks Anthony.