Google Base: Let the speculation begin!
Found an interesting entry on Slashdot which indicated some sort of data store offering from Google. The original article entitled: Google Base: All your base are, in fact, belong to us doesn’t inspire nearly as much curiosity as the contents of the article warrant. But it is a clever title for sure.
Google wants to index your stuff, right? So why not let you send it to them rather than Google having to go “find” it. They’d certainly have the potential for getting the data they want in the format they find most useful.
There’s speculation of Google trying to get information in such a way that they could effectively compete with ebay and craigslist. There’s big money in those hills. But I also wonder, with all of the free stuff Google offers, if they won’t simply offer to host your site for free? Holy cow! What if they offer web hosting and give it away for free? I’m not talking about a Geocities or Angelfire-ish thing. I’m talking about full web hosting with your own domain, built-in ad serving software, many gigabytes of storage and transfer, all riding on the GoogleFS for ultimate redundancy.
Google wants your data and usually they’re going to get/store a copy of it. So their new overhead would be bandwidth. IIRC they own a bunch of dark fiber which just needs to be turned on. Hmmm. This could eat a bunch of Yahoo!’s lunch but would the web hosting industry turn on them and start directing users to Y! instead of Google? Solution: Don’t offer to the public but rather, offer it to web hosting companies who can resell the service.
I’m sure the web hosting angle is far-fetched but 2GB of free, kick-ass email storage used to be far-fetched once upon a time. Oh well… head back in the sand for now.
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