Google launched GoogleBase last night. What a disappointment. Whilst Google Reader clearly points to somebody at Google “getting” the importance of edge published content and real-time indexing, GoogleBase is a throw back. Basically a dumb flat-file database system for the world to throw content into. It’s actually embarrasing for the whole of Silicon Valley. I know insiders who desperately do not want their name associated with it. Can’t say I blame them.

Not to be abusive but why would millions of people who run web sites, and databases, and blogs, suddenly feed stuff into GoogleBase (an act of duplicating their already web based data into another database run by Google)? Maybe to get better search results. But this is an act of pure laziness from Google. The same results could be achieved in a manner far more consistent with the distributed data model that the world is currently flocking to. Google, just define a few extensions to RSS, make it easy to publish a feed with those extensions, and suck in the feeds. It works!

Oh well. Back to work 🙂

Update: well I guess the primary reason this is disappointing is that we expect Google to innovate. This just isn’t innovative. See Mike Arrington’s assessment on TechCrunch