Today
Google Base finally arrived. I took this for a test drive to test the functionality for our
for sale by owner website. We uploaded some real estate listings from our site and them performed a search:
http://base.google.com/base/search?q=for+sale+by+owner&searchBase=Search+Base&hl=enFirst impressions for Searching. From a user point of view. Nice simple, clean layout, typical Google. Easily searchable and relevant. Interestingly, when you search something like: "oconomowoc wi" (yes I posted a listing in this city) with no other tags you would think that a real estate listing with that address would appear first but it doesn't... a car dealer comes first? Overall very nice user experience.
First impressions for Posting. From a publisher point of view. We are working on the RSS bulk upload, so will tell you how that works once we cross that bridge. When uploading items manually, it would be nice it you could save a template of your attributes instead of having to retype each time.
Also, Google Base seems to be a little temperamental regarding the text case of the image extension (i.e. JPG vs jpg), especially when uploading from another website vs. your computer. Again, overall seems to work well but not as easy as craigslist.
My predication... I think craigslist and newspapers will feel some (maybe alot) of pain. Some publishers may feel like they are providing too much data to Google but I think that overall, especially from an exposure point of view, most will give in because of the gained traffic. Consumers will flock to it for it's ease of use and possibly for the fact that aesthetically, it looks nicer that craigslist.
