Google Base

» see base.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

google base launched on 16 november 2005, and the pitch was strange even at the time. anyone with a google account could upload data (products for sale, real estate listings, job postings, whatever else) using xml or excel or txt, and google would try to make sense of the fields and show the items in relevant search results. the beta site let you pick an item type or invent your own, tag it with attributes, and push it into google's index.

this looked to some people like a first move toward the semantic web that a lot of people were talking about in 2005-2006. really though, if google was going to make structured data first-class in search, it would need somewhere for people to send that data. base was the intake bucket. if the pitch had worked, google would have ended up with a growing user-contributed knowledge graph before any of the actual knowledge-graph projects existed at scale.

what actually happened is that the general-purpose ambition never worked and the specific ecommerce use did. most of the volume through google base was product feeds from small and medium merchants who wanted their inventory listed in froogle (later google product search, later google shopping). the recipe uploads, the job listings, the housing listings never got serious volume. google eventually noticed and started narrowing base toward the product-feed use case that was actually working.

i saw base from the outside as a computer science student in ankara, mostly through reading about it on google blog and hacker news posts. i was writing some early web work at the time and remember thinking base was interesting in the same way people were interested in freebase and dbpedia, as a bet on structured data becoming a big part of the web. that bet did not really pay off in the shape base was betting on. schema.org came later and did something related but different, less centralized and more embedded in page markup.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the merchant center pivot ~

google launched google merchant center in september 2010 as the successor to google base for product data specifically. anyway, at that point base was still accepting uploads for other item types but the product side had clearly won. merchant center was a cleaner product interface (feed uploads, error reporting, merchant account tied to google product search) and google encouraged base users to migrate.

the transition ran through 2011 and 2012. by december 2010 google had already deprecated the base api in favor of new google shopping apis. the base site kept serving as a redirect for a while. the non-product item types (jobs and recipes and real estate and events) got orphaned. some of them were folded into other google surfaces (rich snippets, schema.org markup on publisher pages) but not through base itself.

~ the actual end ~

the formal retirement was 1 june 2013. really though, by then almost no one was using base as base. it had been merchant center for two and a half years. the retirement announcement got about as much attention as the equivalent piece of infrastructure being deprecated at any tech company, which is to say almost none.

what stopped working on 1 june was the general upload endpoint and the item-type flexibility. what kept working was the product-feed pipeline under a new name. merchants who cared about their google shopping placements had already moved. small hobby uploaders who had been putting weird item types into base for the last seven years lost their data.

~ what got buried ~

the ambition, mostly. google base was one of a small set of google products in the 2005-2010 window that treated the web as something you could improve by encouraging user-contributed structured data (google notebook, google page creator, orkut communities as loose knowledge graphs). none of those really worked out. google's structured-data play eventually became the knowledge graph itself, which google built from freebase (acquired 2010) and wikipedia and other curated sources, not from public uploads.

the second thing that got buried was one of the last easy on-ramps for small merchants to appear in google shopping without paying for it. google product search was free for merchants through base and merchant center until may 2012, when google announced it was moving to a paid model (google shopping became a paid placement product). google base's death overlapped with that shift. the era of free organic google-shopping placements from a csv upload was over.

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