If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or email alerts. Thanks for visiting!
Google had launched its own version of classifieds called Google Base but we haven’t heard much about it in recent times. Housing was just one of the sections in Google Base. But earlier this week, they integrated Google Base in their most popular product ever - Google Search. Not many people might be searching or listing their items on Google Base but Google Search is the first destination for most when they are looking for stuff even housing.
If you enter a city name followed by “real estate” in the Google Search box, you will see a option just above the first search result just like in the adjoined image. The Google Blog announced this on Thursday and while the listings aren’t available for all U.S. cities yet, they are rapidly adding cities. Almost all the major cities I looked for were available. It lets you specify a location and the listing type - rent, sale, foreclosure before you hit Go. Once you do, you are taken directly to the Google Base Housing section where you can fine tune your search according to a variety of factors that you use during house-hunting. See image below:
Don’t be thrown off by the first $15 million+ offering, you can sort it from low to high as well [you get something for $100 when you do]. You can sort your results by listing type, price, property type, bedrooms, bathroom, and of course, location. The search results are also plotted on an adjacent map. Brokers, Agents, MLSs, and IDX vendors can also add their property listings on Google Base so that they pop up on the search. Now, this is nothing new. There exists an independent mashup - Housing Maps - that uses listings on Craigslist and maps them on Google Maps. But of course, you can imagine who is going to get more traffic - this mashup or results in the Google Search Results page.
Google may thus be moving into Craigslist territory and leveraging its powerful search monopoly to direct traffic to its still-struggling applications like Google Base. Other listing sites may feel shortchanged and resent Google’s thrusting their product in their otherwise potential customers. This would be valid if there were any sponsored advertisements on the search results page but strangely, I don’t see any. Probably Google doesn’t sell ads for those search terms which is strange since it also would be a lucrative market. Does Google hope to earn much more through its Base listings than it would through contextual ads? Maybe time will tell.
by Patrix | on Sunday, April 8th, 2007 at 4:58 pm | 
Business, United States . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
April 8th, 2007 at 5:51 pm reply
Paul Rudamacher, the guy who created Housing Maps, is a Google employee since 2005. So, this really is no surprise, it was imminent.
April 8th, 2007 at 6:04 pm reply
Oops, it should be: Paul Rademacher.
April 9th, 2007 at 8:33 am reply
For houses for sale, like trulia.com a lot better. It has the same criteria you can add, and it also shows you what similar listings ( in the same region) have been sold for in the past, in addition to locality profile etc, and has a lot of information about the areas in general. Haven’t looked too deeply into the google site yet, but did not see these things there. On the other hand, the for rent options are laid out very nicely on google…
April 9th, 2007 at 10:33 am reply
Chetan, thanks for that update. Of course, Google is going to pick up any smart guy that extends the capabilities of their products.
Sqrl, hadn’t heard about Trulia. Will check it out soon. Zillow also lists the prices for the other houses in the neighborhood.
April 9th, 2007 at 1:17 pm reply
Zillow is on Par with Trulia…
Although I am interested in Googles offering.
Carmelo Lisciotto
April 9th, 2007 at 4:18 pm reply
Carmela, I agree that Zillow and Trulia are excellent products and as I noted, the only way Google could tap into this market was through its premier product because that is often the first point of entry for all web searchers.