googlegossip

A few years ago Google released a product called Google Base that turned out to be one of the company’s most spectacular flops. Google base (orGbase) was/is in some sense a next Generation Craiglist. When they first released it there was a lot of speculation that Google was going after E-bay’s market. So far Gbase has had an almost non-existent impact. It is still around ( link ), but it has been deprecated to the point that it is not even listed in Google’s directory of beta products. If you don’t know that it exists - you won’t be able to find it.

I originally tried Gbase when it was first introduced in 2005. At that time I was not impressed with the product. Recently, after reading an article on how E-bay has been alienating its base of independent sellers. I decided to give Gbase a second look. Gbase today is a much better product than the original. In its current incarnation it is both a repository and an aggregator of information. If you deposit a recipe into Gbase, it will get indexed by Google.com; i.e. you can find it with Google. If you are selling a house, or post an announcement for a local event on Gbase it will not only be indexed by Google.com, it will also be indexed by Google-local (i.e. maps). And if you are selling mail order widgets on Gbase, your widgets will be indexed by Google Products and Google.com. On the other if you are looking for information, Gbase will aggregate information from different locations depending upon what you are looking for. For example, if you want to buy a car, Gbase will not only search the Gbase repository, it will serve up information from local car dealers, local online auto sites, and will cull local information from national sites. I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect that Google created Gbase as a tool to help improve the quality of its search results; not as a product to compete against sites like Craiglist, or E-bay. And in this context, Google probably considers Gbase to be a failure.

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