Ever since Base was announced, something about it has bothered me. A lot of people at the time commented on how anti-2.0 the whole affair was. They attacked Google calling it arrogant and demanding it use microformats, not raw XML and give them API's to access to the data. Formats and API’s weren’t what bothered me though.

I’ve always felt that if someone wants to offer a service, what they chose to provide is their prerogative. No self respecting, fund-seeking startup would be seen dead without an API but Google is not a fund-seeking startup and what it does with its data is its business. Base clearly creates value for Google and if it benefits someone enough to insert their data then a reasonable deal has been done. What anyone else has to say is neither here nor there, it's not a transaction that's any of their business.

Nonetheless, there was still something that bothered me about Base and it was only over Christmas I realised what that was. The problem is not that it's a walled garden or that the data is provided in raw XML rather than HTML microformats. The problem is that you have to take your data to Google.

But of course you do, what other alternative could there be?

The alternative is that Google picks it up at the same time as it parses the rest of your website. Put an xml file containing your data at www.yourdomain.com/base.xml (as you can for Google sitemaps) and voila, it appears in Base.

Create a direct access point for people without websites by all means but make sure that people who already have data online can get it to you with a minimum of hassle.

It didn't though and instead requires everyone to send their data to Google. The advantage of such an approach is that it hides the data from its competitors. It also puts Google squarely into the same market as Craigslist. The disadvantage is that many publishers simply won't bother taking that data to Google.

Some might say that such a covert approach is common sense. After all, why promote access to that data and make it easier for others to compete with you? I don’t, I believe that this approach will lead to magnitudes less data being available to Base and will hugely limit the value of their offering. What bothers me about Base is not that it's walled or proprietry, it's that it's nowhere near as powerful as it could be.

Google hasn’t gotten where it is today by cornering customers, it got there by competing against the best out there and beating them. I think that if this was a decision and not an oversight then it also represents over-powering of Larry and Sergey as core decision makers within the company. Base may well be a staging post but as it stands now, it does not bare their hallmarks.

The world might have gone Google-mad but it needs to remember who depends on whom. Take away Google and you have a less-easy-to-navigate web. Take away the web and you have nothing. It is Google who depends on publishers, not as some now imagine, the other way around.

Publishers are like tired but diligent mothers. They'll make sure tea is served each night and it's nourishing and sufficient. Search engines are the kids. If they eat what they're given, they go big and strong. If they don't eat they'll go hungry, cry and get beaten up by other, bigger kids.

Google needs to remember which role it plays in all of this and it's not the mother. Pronouncing it wants silver room-service will not bring it Duck a l'Orange, it will leave it hungry. The quicker Google realises this the less chance there is of its tide turning.

Update:
A month after this post was written, Michael Arrington's Edgeio announced a business based on exactly this type of passive submission method.
Update 2 : 13-4-06
Having inspected the Google Base spec closer, it turns out that you can automatically provide data for Google to upload. Not sure whether this was present at the time of writing and hence renders the original piece moot but were it not then I'm glad it now is and were it so then I guess this was an interesting view into an alter-world.