Taking the next step in their bid to own the entire internet, Google have launched Google Base.

It takes the “tagging” concept familiar to photographers (look at flickr for an example) and applies it to data. Any data. If it can be represented in HTML, it can be stored, described and searched. The idea is you upload your data (recipie, car for sale, resume, cool idea for a new nuclear powered toaster, whatever). Then you tag it with text attributes, i.e “toaster”, “nuclear power”, “zany”.

Currently google base is a separate search but in time I’d expect base data to be integrated into the normal google search results.

As to why… ummm… why not? I guess it’s an easy way of publishing specific targeted content but I can see it getting polluted very quickly - if anybody can upload anything and tag it as anything they like, google will have some fun sorting out the data!