Google Base Debuts for Hosting All Content

Responding to the public's seemingly insatiable appetite for information, Google has begun publicly testing Google Base, a service designed to host and make searchable "all types of online and offline content," the Mountain View, California, company announced.
Described as an extension of existing Google content collection efforts, such as Web crawl, Google Base lets large companies and individuals alike post data in the form of categorized items that Google will host and make searchable for free, according to Bindu Reddy, a company product manager, in an early-morning entry in Google's official Web log.
Google Base appears to be Google's most concrete move to date into the realm of user-generated content and tagging, popularized by services such as the Del.icio.us social-bookmarking site and Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site.
The range of items that users can post on Google Base encompasses such disparate things as poems, events, recipes, research papers, products, and job postings, according to information on the Google Base Web site.