Zeitgeist to launch
Today Google's invite-only Partner Forum Zeitgeist 05 started and although no press coverage or blogging is permitted they still managed to keep everyone talking about Google Base which – as the Official Google Blog states – is a new way for content owners to submit their content to Google.
According to these screenshots the service will let you host this kind of items:
- Classifieds about services you offer or items you sell.
- Articles written by webmasters.
- Work done by researchers
The amount of information they want to handle is huge, it looks like their distributed structured storage system called BigTable which was presented last week in a talk at University of Washington is ready for it. BigTable is in use in Google Print, My Search History, Orkut, the Crawling/Indexing pipeline, Google Maps/Google Earth, Blogger and recently the Google Reader Blog mentioned thy are using it.
The most notable thing about the upcoming product is that they are organizing the information with labels – Google's name for tagging classification – and attributes of items like Course Schedules, Events and Activities (Google Calendar powered?), Housing, Jobs, News and Articles, People Profiles, Products, Reference Articles, Reviews, Services, Travel, Vehicles and Wanted Ads. This will give them more meta-data to enhance their ranking and filtering algorithms to give better search results.
Although it looks like a move to empower Froogle and Google Local to compete against Craigslist or eBay, it is the application on top of the RDF store that Adam Bosworth was talking about in his keynote at MySQL Users Conference 2005 that will let Google gain more general knowledge of the world; only if the filter that may be in place when an item goes from "Processing – will publish soon" status to "Published" is good enough to handle the spam to come.
So people with access to the Zeitgeist Blog are probably reading something about the mentioned Google Base, upcoming Google Calendar and Google Purchases, how does the hosted Office in partner with Sun will be?, how will they offer Pay-Per-Call advertising?, how is their automated translation system working and other interesting stuff that we will read about soon.
This article has been contributed by Creative Reporter – Alberto. Alberto Saavedra is a internet researcher who watches closely the search engine industry and the online advertising market.
