For the first few days, everyone was focused on Google Base’s implication on the e-commerce industry (auction + classified). But there is something much bigger at work here as everyone started to noodle on the bigger implication around data, ownership, business model and access.

I alluded to these issues in my last post on the ping server acquisition (weblogs.com) by Versign that the current “crawl” model for information indexing is simply not sustainable in the long run.

Information on the web is generated at lightning speed which makes these search engine indexes almost obsolete the moment it’s done crawling the site. For example if a search engine only crawls John Battelle’s Searchblog once a day (which is a privilege reserved for the chosen few) the index is irrelevant the moment John puts up another post (man, the guy is prolific). As a result, “push” indexing will go the ways of the dinosaur if the lifecycle content of the web continues to increase. (Remember how old the Google image index was last year? I think something like 6 month old! imagine if a blog search engine has a 6 month old index). As a result blog search engines use the ping/subscribe/crawl architecture which is a lot more efficient with fresher indexes.

GoogleBase is an attempt to take that one step further. Couched in the terms of faster index inclusion and traffic generation, Google wants to take your data directly into their hosting infrastructure. Screw pinging, directly update your data on Google Base! If that doesn’t sound scary perhaps we need to remember the uproar we had over Microsoft Passport and Plaxo’s initial hosted data model. Just because Google claims to “do no evil” doesn’t mean it can replicate MSN’s product model and get away with it. In a world where data is becoming more federated and open, Google is taking a page from a book of a bygone era.

I have my faith that federated, open, and “ping” is the better model for the future of the search engine evolution. Yes, the GoogleBase model is technically superior; but I’m not too sure we all want to live in a world singly built ontop of SkyNet Google. We’ve done that for the last 20 years with Microsoft, I don’t want to switch one master for another just when I see an inkling of change.