Google Base – what’s it good for? I’m interested to hear what others think.
it seems way too basic of a service – felt like i was back in 1995 and using Yahoo. By now it’s quite obvious that Google is becoming a portal but while some services are Web2.0, Google Base seems way too Web1.0 – perhaps even pre-Web1.0
Adding items was too basic. There was nothing stopping me from adding erroneous or misleading information. In addition, Google has added further confusion by calling Tags, Labels. As it is the average Joe doesn’t know what the difference between Keywords and Tags, are now there’s yet another term..
After I finished adding all my info, I was asked to sign in or create a new account – here’s the screen I kept getting
not normal for Google to have simple probs like this. anyway, i finally gave up on adding a listing and moved on to browsing existing ones. Pretty lame as well. I started browsing for cars in my area. Sure Google had some cool features like automatically providing a map with icons for all of the cars I was currently looking at. (Google automatically set a limit of 45 miles around my current location – which would be interesting if I was surfing while travelling elsewhere).
The actual info provided though was no better than Yahoo from 10 years ago with no apparent method to ensure quality. Compared to Google’s other offerings – Base falls short. At present, I see no use that can’t be solved better by Yahoo or Ebay.
Here’s my earlier post on Google Base.
also seems like i’m not the only one who’s underwhelmed about Google Base.
Fred Wilson at AVC thought it was lame too.
and Paul Kedrosky kept getting the same error as me.
Here’s a post at Changing Way as well.
Anyone else have views?