Google Basing the MLS II

Well it seems that as soon as I posted my mls.google.com story about Google Base, I started seeing similar takes in the real estate industry and elsewhere.

Blogs are that way aren't they? Topics often firing off simutaneously.

I saw references in Inman News as well as off-real estate blog marketing sites.

GoodRoI actually pointed out how the results seem to be showing up in the regular SERPS ( Search Engine Ranking Position). Perhaps a beta test of some kind.

GoogdROI references a poster over at Webmasterworld as having said that this is going to be a mess as every Realtor massively uploads their MLS listings and the rest of the MLS. This will cause a massive duplicate content problem. Not to mention all the vendors will get into the game of uploading your listings as a service.

Why would they do that? So they can get the traffic back to their site thats why. One poster actually brought out a brilliant point.

Drumat5280 said:

Google Base scares me.

I can handle competition from other sites, but competition from Google itself scares me in the classified ad market.

I am sure Craigslist and Monster are also starting to get scared.

This actually could be interpreted as a shot across the bow of agents trying to get Natural search results. If the bulk of the results are Google Base for real estate, then agents will have no choice but to pay for clicks.

This shows that results in natural search can come from, not only natural SERPS, but Local Search and perhaps Google Base. Oy Vey!

Comments

[BrendanKing]

Tim, interesting Take on Google Base. I, for one, don't believe that Google intends base to be a challenge to the MLS. In fact, I think there is a lot of confusion around their intent but at the end of the day they are pursuing their mission to: “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” I have more thoughts and clarifications here: http://point2agent.wordpress.com/2006/03/27/basegooglecom/

Brendan

[Tim O'Keefe]

Thanks for the post Brendan...?I agree that Google does not have some evil plan.

But the results from their actions will be the same nonetheless.

Tim

[Shah Nawaz]

I founded the first Real estate computer academy in 1991 and since then I have been following the technology impact on the real estate industry. I agree that the cyberspace is cluttered with same information multiplied many times. But ultimately worlwide MLS like roogle(ROOGLE.COM) will be of great help specialy for international links.

[valnur]

We are in a similar market as Google Base but our product gives structure (while still not imposing any set of predefined categories) to our index and therefore makes it possible for users to not only perform keyword search but also browse hierarchically with the ability to specify unlimited number of filters to refine their search.