Google Base is something of a hybrid between a comparison shopping site (think pricegrabber.com) and a community bulletin board (think craigslist.org). Google has a comparison site called Froogle that was intended to let large merchants list their products in Google system and provide a way to comparison shop. The Froogle listing process is now being replaced by Google Base which basically lets anyone post almost any type of content. It is very similar to CraigsList in this respect. I’m not crazy about the name Google Base as it does not convey any type of imagery regarding shopping or a bulletin site whatsoever, but that’s a different story.
The reason to use Google Base is simple. Online, your web pages compete with millions of others for customer views. By listing your item in Google Base, you instantly narrow the competition you face by several orders of magnitude. For instance, if we are a customer and are looking for a particular Sony digital camera, we might search for “buy sony dsc-t10” in Google. The search results will pull from millions of pages that the seller’s all compete for rank. Some of the pages will actually be ecommerce...