GoogleBase: Structured/Vertical/Domain Search Ain't The Fre

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(More thinking out loud....) I recently spoke to a reputable person who is a senior exec in a major structured database company ( I promised not to name this person or the company/industry.) I can't go into specifics, but the company owns a very large repository of valuable industry listings, and has an web-based interface that allows folks to search those listings. Think Autobytel, or even Craigslist, but this is a vertical player in a very information intensive business. The data this company owns is locked behind a registration wall, search engines can not get to it through normal crawling techniques. It's part of the paid or "dark" web: not freely available. The company has spent a lot of time and money creating specialized search interfaces that are useful to its target market. Anyway, a few months ago or so Google approached this person and asked if the company would want to work with Google. In essence, Google asked the company to upload its entire database into Google, which would then be mashed up, perhaps, with Google Maps and Local, and given a structured search front end and a structured database backend. When GoogleBase story broke, the person put two and two together. This is what Google wanted to do - upload the company's data into GoogleBase, this person told me. But at the time of their discussion, Google made no mention of that product. When Google comes calling asking for your entire database, one might reasonably wonder what the company which owns that database might get in return. In this case, and in other cases I've heard about, the answer was "give us your data and you'll get lots of traffic in return." No discussion of syndication models, or shared revenues. How does this differ from Oodle? Well,...

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