Google appears to be tinkering with something called Google Base, which will allow webmasters, merchants and others to upload data and Google will be the backend search engine.

Here’s their carrot:

You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle and Google Local.

GoogleBlogscope ponders:

This sounds big and immensely interesting. Is Google putting a layer in-between dynamic web sites and their databases, replacing MySQL/PostgreSQL/MS SQL, and creating a new GoogleSQL… possibly, with their ads in it? I can’t wait to try it.

Unfortunately there isn’t enough for me to look at to describe or pontificate further. It’s definitely bookmarked, though. Would be interesting if Google would offer up their servers for database access and provide the default search for custom databases.

If they let webmasters hook in through their own APIs to do various queries and results to return then that could be very disruptive to the existing database and hosting layer but it seems too early to tell if that is their plan or not.

Other bloggers are saying
SE Round Table adds to the rumour that Google is getting into the Real Estate listing game and “… taking a jab at craigslist for some territory” and then adds this curious tidbit: “according to Google … We expect that ‘Google Purchases’ –the new micropayments service among users– will be also introduced as a complement to ‘Google Base’.”
John Battelle: “Apparently this will be debuted at Google’s invite only Zeitgeist conference today.”

It’s currently blowing up at tech.memerandum if you want to follow more.

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