Google has taken the next step in its quest to “organise the world’s information” with the release of Google Base in beta.

“Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content that we’ll host and make searchable online. You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle, Google Base and Google Local.”

In a sense this is an eBay for anything – with no listing charges. Or you could view it as a free Google Adwords service – with knobs; or perhaps just a convenient way to publish tagged web pages. Having only peeked at the service for 10 minutes, I won’t speculate further. Clearly the folks at Google Labs are already busy considering these issues and the likelihood that significant spam will ensue.

You can submit single data items to Google Base using a simple web form; or use the bulk upload option to send tab-delimited (XLS or text) or XML (RSS or Atom) files.