The much-anticipated Google Base, which the tech MSM absurdly touted as Google’s ‘eBay killer’, is finally available to the general public.

I registered with my gmail account, and started to play around. My interest in Google Base is primarily in how a company like Google approaches the data modeling challenge inherent in any attempt to list and publish arbitrary structured information.

My current impression is that it’s pretty weak.

It’s cool that you can publish arbitrary structured information which conforms to a named type, either prefab or one of your own devising. It’s cool that Google Base generates a random email address which presumably can be used to contact you about the item. What’s not cool is that the information modeling capabilities are extremely weak.

The information model is a named type, with named attributes and corresponding values. The attributes are typed, with the following types available:

• Text
• Number-unit
• Number
• Date range
• Large text
• Web URL
• Checkbox
• Item Location

No list types, no nested items, and no apparent API (at least not yet). I’m rather underwhelmed. I suspect these types are rich enough for basic content listings, which is probably all Google intends to use this for. I was hoping to see an advanced data modeling system which could be used to host fairly complex data models on the Google network. Oh well.