All set to get into full-fledged e-commerce, the world's most acclaimed search engine, Google, is about to launch a service called 'Google Base' that would place it squarely in the realm of giant online retailers and auction sites such as Amazon and eBay as well as local and national classified and job sites.
It is worth noting however that Google does not complain (to outsiders) when these companies or any other ventures into the search engine market, A9.com, as an example, instead Google simply endeavours to make their own service better.
The new service, which will allow users to list whatever they wish to sell from used cars to real estate, is likely to be backed by a payment service to take the purchase experience to its entirety.
A Google Base screen shot that revealed the way the site would look like was doing the rounds of the Internet briefly before being blocked off, possibly because the company is still believed to be “testing ways for content owners to send their content”.
However, what is known is that the service offers users an opportunity to “Post items on Google”, which some analysts believe could be as early as next week. They also say that the Google Base service is also possibly a forerunner to the much-awaited Google payment service.
Google, which is on a high as far as earnings are concerned, has already launched a slew of services this year causing its market capitalization to zoom to the $100-billion club in just 14 months from first listing.
The company also seems keen to remain the darling of market and as if its numerous new measures were not adequate, it recently announced another favorable measure of focusing on the fastest-growing Chinese online market.
Analyst, Derek Brown of Pacific Growth Equities suggests that with the Google Base service, “Google is maybe striking at the heart of eBay by offering a perhaps free venue for individuals to list items for sale”.
After eBay's August 2004 acquisition of a 25 percent stake in Craigslist, the market is virtually divided between three major players. Meanwhile everybody is guessing as to the extent of Google's new service being tied to its other long-term offerings on the anvil.
A few analysts suggest that Google could “generate enough listings” to allow consumers to begin using searches to locate this type of information. Analysts are even going as far as assessing the impact of Google's new service on eBay should it in tandem “unveil a payment service”, which they put at “minimal” in the immediate term.
But clearly Google's entry into rival territory could not be more dramatic as it possibly is building strength as a repository for all types of information as varied as maps, books and scientific data.
The scale of their plans is something that keeps rumor mills spinning that something entirely new like a “Semantic Web” is in the offing from Google's side. An idea favored by the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, actually sees the web itself as something more intelligent than what it is today.
Gartner vice president Whit Andrews says, “In the last 10 years we have seen a number of initiatives intended to make it easier to build a data-driven web site”. But this is more like building a data-driven website from other's data in a publicly available database. Such a move is only likely draw Google closer to eBay in competition and yet in many respects far removed and futuristic.
