Let the "All your base belong to us" jokes begin. As if commanding the world’s most widely used search engine, forming joint ventures with NASA and Sun Microsystems, and devising plans to offer free wireless Internet access in San Francisco and beyond weren’t enough to keep Google occupied, the Mountain View based company earlier this week unintentionally provided a sneak peek at what appears to be an impending expansion into classified advertising — a move that would have the search engine giant going toe-to-toe with online marketplace eBay, the chic classified-ad site Craigslist, and quite possibly the entire newspaper industry.
Blogs are a buzzing and speculation is rampant, upon a British programmer’s discovery of the website for Google’s much-rumored online classified service, dubbed "Google Base". Tony Ruscoe, the British programmer who discovered the "Google Base" page, claimed that he had created an automatic program to search for sub-domains on Google’s main website and came across what was once an undercover project. Google promptly reacted by replacing the page with a "403" forbidden access response. However, by that time, screenshots of the site were posted on blogs, forums, and media sites all over the Internet.
Purportedly, Google’s service-to-be is an all-encompassing database to which users can submit a wide range of personal or miscellaneous content to. Google’s examples (taken from posted screenshots) of suitable content include a description of your party planning service, a listing of your used car for sale, or even a database of protein structures. Google, upon receiving such content, will apparently host and make it searchable through the use of “attributes,” or tags at no charge.
Screenshots also revealed that GoogleBase would allow users to post and categorize their own items, using their own category or one that Google has already created. The instructions on the site’s main page read as follows: "You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base…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."
Though refusing to comment on GoogleBase’s future services, Eileen Rodriquez, a spokesperson for the company said: "We are testing new ways for content owners to easily send their content to Google, which will complement existing methods such as web crawl and the Google Sitemaps program." Though Rodriquez didn’t provide any more details, the screenshots may very well be a shot across the bow for online players like eBay and Craigslist, not to mention traditional print newspapers.
By allowing users to list items wanted or offered for sale in an online-classified forum, at the same time making them searchable without charging a fee, Google could pose as a formidable threat to eBay. After all, eBay’s business relies heavily on the millions of listings it attracts from sellers. Reportedly, users pay an average of 7 per cent of the value of sales they conduct through eBay.
In recent months, Google and eBay have acted like direct competitors. For instance, eBay invested heavily in its own search engine, known as Magellan, to provide buyers with a more streamlined approach in sifting through eBay’s mushrooming database of items up for sale. Google, recently revealed plans to launch its own online payment system, referred to as Google Wallet, which some might say will butt heads with leading online payment solutions provider and eBay-owned, PayPal.
Though, Google quietly issued a statement that its upcoming online payment service will not be a direct competitor to PayPal, the emergence of plans for a Google Wallet must have seriously irked eBay officials. Coincidentally or not, eBay has just recently updated their “Safe Payments Policy,” which now basically states “…sellers may not request payment through online payment methods not specifically permitted in eBay’s policy.” Will eBay allow for online payments via Goolge Wallet? It doesn’t look like it to me. Plan on using PayPal and only PayPal when using eBay.
Both Google and eBay have also rushed to include communications in their offerings, with eBay buying the Skype Internet phone service and Google crafting its own instant messaging and voice service, Google Talk. Oddly enough, eBay is one of Google’s largest advertisers.
The online auction giant isn’t the only major online player that needs to watch its back, take for instance Craigslist, a burgeoning classified-ad site. GoogleBase actually looks to be the foundational grounds of a universal, but classified market similar to Craigslist, which arguably is a more effective marketplace than a search engine, even if that search engine could churn out local results or listings.
Of course, another similarity to Craigslist could be the detrimental effect that such a free service would have on newspaper classifieds. Reportedly, local newspapers based in cities which boast significant Craigslist usership, have felt the wrath of what has become known as the “Craigslist effect,” a correlation which epitomizes the inverse relationship shared between the growing usership of Craigslist within a particular city to the revenue generated by the city’s local newspaper’s classified section. Google’s entrance into the classified ad market would only accelerate such a trend and the end result would be less money for the local newspapers. Many other organizations, from online job sites like Monster and Hot Jobs, to apartment rental services and Yellow Pages companies, also rely on listings and classified advertisements that could possibly fall within the firing range of Google Base.
For the consumer, Google appears to be a win-win. With GoogleBase allegedly being a free service, and with Google set to launch the Google Wallet online payment service, we could potentially have on our hands a free version of eBay/Paypal with Craigslist functionality – completely ad-supported. Imagine, such a service that will allow you as the user, to put up an item for sale and in one shot, have it potentially show up in three of Google’s main venues, its search index, Froogle, and Google Local. While I don’t want to sound like a Google advertisement, that’s not a bad deal!
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