Searching the invisible web

I'll join the optimist review from Michael Parekh about Google Base and elaborate a bit more on the technical assessment from Bill Burnham about how this new launch from Google of what will become a very large XML database (I first read about this concept in Nova Spivack's blog).

The Invisible Web represents a larger set of pages than those currently indexed by Google. It's size can only be estimated. By allowing RSS compliant applications to submit their knowledge to Google Base in a loosely structured fashion, Google is basically creating the infrastructure to attract all these sources, giving them a reason to become visible on their own terms, via a feed. No longer should they fear robots crawling through sensitive information, they can apply whatever filters or transformations they consider necessary and upload the information.