Google Base is Live

Google Base, the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't free Web-based database which first surfaced a couple of weeks ago, is now live. I haven't dug into it yet, but you can browse stuff that's already been posted there or start uploading your own data. (Here's Google's own blog posting announcing the launch.)

Google Base can be used to store information of any sort--the company seems to like using recipes as an example. Already, there's commercial stuff like classified ads and job listings in there; the service has been described as an eBay killer or a Craigslist killer. At the moment, it's clearly very far from being either.

I recently sold a wristwatch on eBay and was struck by just how highly-evolved that service is--it not only has scads of general features for buying and selling (and in PayPal, the mechanism for moving the payment between parties), it has tools specifically for people selling vintage watches, and for folks doing many, many other specialized tasks. It took eBay a decade to get so powerful and easy to use, and I don't see Google Base catching up anytime soon, even though its features for defining data types are, in a sense, an attempt to get users to do some of the heavy lifting that eBay's done itself.

Some of the folks who think that Google is out to take on eBay and Craigslist envision, I'm sure, that the company wants to take a monetary cut of transactions that take place in Google Base. There's no infrastructure for doing so at the moment. But the company doesn't have to be a financial middleman, or to replicate the richness of other sites, to change the game.

Google has become the most powerful company on the Web by doing a spectacular job at finding stuff in the messy, far-flung, essentially unruly place known as the Web. With Google Base, the company is asking the world to store information right on Google's servers, and do so in a tidy, easy-to-understand way. And it's up-front about the fact that the main Google search engine (as well as other services such as Google Local) may point to information stored in Google Base, putting this new service at the very heart of Google's business.

If the world responds by entrusting Google with massive amounts of data, and the company monetizes it with its usual amazing efficiency, this could be the start of something big. And maybe--over time--a threat to big established sites. We'll see. (Google has introduced such a dizzying array of services in just the past six months that I can't imagine it's going to give all of them the time and TLC they need to be major hits.)

Incidentally, one question I'd want answered before I dumped valuable information into Google Base is this: Just what rights to my stuff is Google claiming? Can they do what they want with it and distribute it throughout Google and elsewhere as they see fit? Can I delete records or entire databases and have them vanish instantly? And how easy is it to get data out of Google Base?

Okay, that's a bunch of questions. The answers may be in Google's documentation somewhere, but I don't see them immediately....