November 16th, 2005

Google Base Item Types

by Joshua Porter  |   8 Comments  |  shortlink: http://bokardo.com/p/270

So Google Base launched today. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s been called an eBay and Craigslist killer among other things.

Whether or not you believe that Google Base will have that effect, the anxiety it produces comes from the “item type” feature, which I find fascinating. Item types are simply content genres, or types of content. Here is the complete list of prepopulated item types on Google Base so far:

  • Course Schedules
  • Events and Activities
  • Jobs
  • News and Articles
  • People Profiles
  • Products
  • Recipes
  • Reference Articles
  • Reviews
  • Services
  • Vehicles
  • Wanted Ads

The system basically allows anybody to add an instance of any of these things to the Google Base database. Here’s a recipe for Chicken Tikka Masala, one of my favorite Indian dishes. But Google Base also allows users to add their own item types. So I could go in and add an item type for a baseball box score, for example.

This reminds me of the vision of Joe Reger’s XML Schema tool, which I wrote about in early September. It allows people to create genres of content for their own use.

But Google seems to have bigger plans. At first glance this looks like some sort of content platform.

Other interesting things:

  1. Google has done *everything* except produce the actual content. They’ve set up a system for which the only thing people have to do is type words.
  2. Nowhere is the format of the item types mentioned. This shows that Google understands that semantic markup is for geeks only, and regular users don’t care a whit about it. In fact, Google doesn’t seem to care about it, as its item type markup is mush.
  3. This is the next logical step after blogging. Instead of throwing all of our content at a single blog-like item type, Google Base is recognizing which item types are popular and providing targeted fields for those. If blog software chose to support these item types, we would choose which one we wanted as we started a blog post. As Joe Reger’s datablogging effort shows, this is coming even as we speak.
  4. They’ve built in a tagging feature. Users can tag items! With Amazon adding tagging earlier this week and now Google adding it, (although they’ve already had it in their Search History feature), it shows that tagging is garnering some huge attention.

In effect, Google is taking on the world here. They recognized that the popular services out there (Craigslist, eBay, Delicious) are simply really, really good at one item type. Craigslist is great at classifieds, eBay is great at auction listings, and Delicious is great at bookmarks.

Now, Google has an answer to each of these in the prepopulated list items. If those companies don’t see Google Base as a shot across their bow, I think they will soon.

Update:For folks who don’t think it’s a big deal, just wait until some innovative developer leverages it in a way that you can’t predict…think Google Maps, Craigslist and Housingmaps…

Also, much more coverage: All Your Base are Google, The Launch (John Battelle), Google Base Launched, Yuck (TechCrunch), and Google Base: RDF lite silo? (Danny Ayers)

Check out my latest project: Make them Care!, a book on designing great sign-up experiences. Get reminded when it's published.

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Comments

1.  CM Harrington 11:02am, Wed 16th, 2005

I think the whole “semantic markup” is mostly meant to help with computer to computer interoperability. Humans just care about the presentation. However, if we want to move forward and allow machines to make sense of the content in a way that humans do, we have to “nudge” our content.

This isn’t as necessary in Google’s case, as they’ve “pre-bucketed” the content. However, to say that Google doesn’t care about semantic markup isn’t fully true, as their search engine seems to rank well-formed, semantically marked-up code better than “code mush”.

2.  Doug Marttila 11:27am, Wed 16th, 2005

Where’s the public API? I did a quick search and couldn’t find one, which is not surprising. I think Google is making a mistake in this area. Compared to Yahoo and now eBay, they are lacking.

3.  Len 4:49am, Thu 17th, 2005

Nowhere is the format of the item types mentioned. This shows that Google understands that semantic markup is for geeks only, and regular users don’t care a whit about it. In fact, Google doesn’t seem to care about it, as its item type markup is mush.

They don’t have to care cause the base interface allready provides such a semantic interface. It is similar to the fields in a database of a blog.

Date, link, body content, author, looks very similar like you mentioned.

If you look at the network of blogs and how easy it is to connect all these things together I would argue that semantics is NOT for geeks but for real users. Allthouth they don’t have to care about this. Most of the geeks don’t understand a bit about semantics. They only talk about the technical details and not the information structure that is generated or can be generated form semantically rich content.

A final note, I don’t see the what the fuzz is all about. It looks like an open blogger interface, open to anyone to add content, rubish or usefull.

Who’s going to write all these things?

4.  Jeff Watkins 12:25pm, Thu 17th, 2005

Not to be snarky, but I hope this works better than Google Analytics, which I haven’t been able to log into since last night.

5.  Josh 12:21am, Fri 18th, 2005

Len, I was talking about semantic markup, not semantics (assuming there is a difference). I agree with you that semantics are for real users…absolutely.

6.  Mike 1:39pm, Wed 19th, 2006

Google Base is a great addition to the online world. After playing with it for a while I realized its potential for online marketing. The thing about services like Google Base you have to jump on it now, before everyone gets hip to it, so by this time next year or years to come you already have claimed your stake and you will easily rank well. Google Base can be the webmasters dream but at the same time it can also be the spammers/scammers playground.

7.  valnur 11:14pm, Fri 20th, 2009

We are in a similar market as Google Base but our product gives structure (while still not imposing any set of predefined categories) to our index and therefore makes it possible for users to not only perform keyword search but also browse hierarchically with the ability to specify unlimited number of filters to refine their search.

Valnur
http://www.valnur.com