Google to launch eBay competitor?

By Steve Malone

Posted on 27 Oct 2005 at 10:29

Google watchers were agog when a new service from the world's biggest search engine briefly made an appearance and then disappeared again. The service called Google Base appeared to be a classified advertising service that would allow users to post their items for sale.

The page itself explained that Google Base allows users to 'add all types of content.'. it also says it will host the content and make it searchable online for free.

The demo Google Base site carried a variety of suggestions for things as diverse as used cars, party planners, articles on current events from your website and, weirdly enough, a database of protein structures.

As the Google watch blogs went into overdrive, Google itself was as enigmatic as ever. In the official Google blog the company merely said 'We are testing a new way for content owners to submit their content to Google, which we hope will complement existing methods such as our web crawl and Google Sitemaps'.

eBay should be nervous. At first sight it would seem that Google is merely allowing people to post details of absolutely anything (hence the proteins) and developing some kind of tagging system which would give another kick to its already huge index. However, it doesn't take much of a leap to see how the user postings might become offers for sale.

It is expected that Google plans to offer any such classified service for free but presumably supported by its ubiquitous adwords contextual advertising.

Furthermore, although Google has persistently denied reports that it intends to launch a competitor to the online payments service PayPal owned by eBay, rumours of the so-called Google Wallet service continue to circulate. This followed another brief sighting of a site 'Google Purchases' which asked users to sign up with credit card information - a necessary first step for any Google brokered classified ads service.