We speculated a few weeks ago that Google launching its new Merchant Center meant a finale to its rarely used Google Base.
Today then Google has issued this statement:
Google Base has its own search page for users to search across everything that’s been uploaded, but it isn’t widely used. Instead, people search on Google Product Search for products, or on Google Maps to find houses for rent or sale. Therefore, we’re planning to retire Google Base’s separate search page in a few weeks.
They go on to state that since very few people used the Base search page to find products that merchants will not notice much of a difference in terms of traffic driven to their site.
In our experiences this is certainly the case–given that Google’s one-box features links to its Product Search page, and the Base link isn’t even listed in their search results page.