Well, it looks like it’s another Google shipping week. Monday they announced Google Analytics, which is what they made out of Urchin, an acquired company doing web-statistics. It’s completely free for sites below a certain number of page hits (and it’s such a large number that I’m sure I will always be able to use it for free). Paradoxically, not everyone’s happy about the service turning from paid to free (read about that here), but I guess that’ll all be settled once Google has stocked up on their system resources. Right now it’s sluggish and unresponsive, which of course can be attributed to the fact that everyone and their grandma is now tracking their website’s stats with Google Analytics.
The second Google service was announced today. It’s Google Base, that thing everyone and their grandma was talking about a few weeks back when Google was caught during a test drive. There was a whole lot of speculation as to what it would be, but in the end, nobody really knew. Well, now it’s officially launched and I still don’t really know what it does. Well, let’s look at what they say on the front page:
Google Base is a place where you can add all types of information that we’ll host and make searchable online.You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle and Google Local.
Right, uh, what? You can actually enter everything and hope Google picks it up? What is this? Spammer heaven? Let’s see what other people say. Michael Arrington from TechCrunch:
It’s ugly. It’s centralized content with less functionality than ebay or craigslist.
Exactly. It’s a monstrosity and I doubt it will be able to lift itself off the ground and soar like the eagle it was designed to be (the eagle part was made up…I don’t think it was designed to be an eagle, not even figuratively speaking).