Comments on: Google Base Item Types

By: valnur

valnur — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 04:14:24 +0000

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

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 17:39:05 +0000

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.

By: Josh

Josh — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 05:21:31 +0000

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.

By: Jeff Watkins

Jeff Watkins — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 17:25:25 +0000

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.

By: Len

Len — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 09:49:23 +0000

Nowhere is the format of the item types mentioned. This shows that Google understands that semantic markup is for geeks only, and regular users donâ€™t care a whit about it. In fact, Google doesnâ€™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?

By: Carlos Mantero » Blog Archive » El tiempo es oro

Carlos Mantero » Blog Archive » El tiempo es oro — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 21:14:13 +0000

[...] De los posts que llevo leÃdos -me quedan sobre unos 600- me han parecido bastante interesantes el nuevo y embaucador servicio de Google, Google Analytics, la API de eBay, el piromano de Chicago, el lanzamiento de oficial de Google Base y la clasificaciÃ³n de supercomputadores. [...]

By: Doug Marttila

Doug Marttila — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 16:27:25 +0000

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.

By: CM Harrington

CM Harrington — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 16:02:27 +0000

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”.