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Other than Froogle, Google Base reminds me of another initiative: the Semantic Web, evangelized by the creator of the web, Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C. In this initiative, site owners will share meta-information on their available data using RDF files on their own servers. As opposed to Google Base, it would be decentralized, offering different external spiders to make sense of it all. The Semantic Web is more than just that – “search for yellow car in Chicago, and precisely find it on any kind of webpage” – but that’s a part of it, and I have to say this part so far didn’t surface in web reality. (Unless you consider RSS, and we have reason to doubt the success of RSS has anything to do with RDF syntax.)

Not only does Google Base have a centralized approach to adding meta-data to items, unlike the Semantic Web you don’t even need to have your own web server if you prefer; “Google Base will host your content (for free) on a unique web address”, as the help page states. And who knows when they’ll add their own PayPal-like money transaction service and start charging commissions. Google Wallet could be the last piece of the puzzle here.

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