The other day, Google, in typical “we’re so cool we don’t even have to announce anything” fashion, made available an early beta version of a web-page-building service called Google Page Builder. It’s an AJAX application (sidenote: for the 99% of you out there who aren’t following the over-hyped, so-called “Web 2.0” fad, AJAX stands for “Advanced Javascript and XML” and simply means that it uses the latest features of the popular web browsers to make web pages feel and behave more like applications) with some basic templates.
Based on the first look here inside Homestead, it’s a fairly basic attempt, and lacks most of the functionality of our simple AJAX editor, Site Builder Lite. Of course, it will get better, but for now it doesn’t look like a serious tool for small businesses. More like a 2006 version of GeoCities or Homestead circa 1998, with some Web 2.0 whistles (see my definition of Web 2.0 here). However, Google entering this space is not insignificant. Most importantly, they have already made their pages extremely friendly to the Google spiders (sidenote: “spiders” or “bots” are what search engine companies call their programs that are constantly scouring billions of web pages for their latest content. If you want your page to be found by a search engine, it has to be visible to their spider. Whenever you publish a page on Homestead, it gets spidered regularly by all of the popular search engines, but if you just stick a page up on the Internet by yourself, you have to spend time and energy making sure the search engines can find it, and notice your changes.)
Google Base, a service that they launched last year, is important for the same reasons. Content that you enter into Google Base is immediately available to people searching the flagship Google destination. This can take weeks or even months to accomplish without Google's assistance, so being able to do this in a few hours is no small benefit. It remains to be seen how seriously Google will invest in these platforms, and whether they will continue to allow people to "main-line" data directly into their index without a fee, but there are a ton of possibilities here, some very scary for the rest of us out here on the Web.
I LOVE GOOGLE!
Posted by: Hello | August 31, 2006 at 04:01 PM
Google has some great tools like mail, analytics, etc. But sitebuilder is for absolutely amateurs. Worth nothing I think.
Posted by: Balazs Balint | March 23, 2007 at 11:16 AM
Why would it be scary for you?
Posted by: funtastyk | March 24, 2007 at 08:06 PM