The Google Base promise

December last year I wrote about Google Base "as a potential king of vertical search". Yesterday Google announced the Google Base API, a very important step in that direction. The API allows for entering, editing and retrieval of data on a large scale. Data essentially consisting of advertisements in several categories. What is so important about this is that all this content (which for the most part was already available on the web) is now structured so that it can easily be (re)used. By Google, but also by others that write applications that use data stored in Google Base. Structuring (now unstructured) data will be a very important element in the 'search engine war' between companies like Google, Yahoo en Microsoft. SimplyHired and Edgeio are other examples of this trend, they focus on niches. It would not surprise me however if an inportant part of their data will come from services like Google Base in the near future. And they will submit their own listings to Google Base in order to generate search engine leads.