Hunting down “homes for sale” through a typical Google search returns extra search boxes for location and listing type; using those search boxes brings up a mashup of Google Base and Maps with listings for available properties.
The next step in Google’s extended promotion of its Base service has been observed by blogger Shimon Sandler, who posted about the latest functionality to emerge from the search advertising company.
By visiting Google and searching for “homes for sale,” up pops a couple of boxes and a “Search housing” button underneath the sponsored links at the top of the page.
“Refine your search for homes for sale,” the copy reads above the search boxes, where users can enter their US location and the type of listing they want to see. The housing search then takes them to a Google Map, with pushpins for homes listed on the left side of the page.
Listings that appear here contain the location, listing type, price, number of bedrooms, and a link to more information. The listings show who posted it and when, and also provides a link to report a bad listing to Google.
Inside Google blogger Nathan Weinberg commented on how much of this functionality has been seen already, and how Google has taken advantage of the Google Base approach:
Google is building specialty search engines, simply by having users and companies do all the work for them, loading the info into the Google dataBase, and building a simple search engine front-end around it. As soon as they have a critical mass of data, they add the search as a OneBox result in regular Google search, and thus, they’ve added a brand new targeted search engine, with a minimum of effort.
Weinberg pointed out how Google has already done this for cars, and a query for “cars for sale” returns a “Search vehicles” option, with location, car make, and condition boxes users can select.
Clicking on a listing in either the real estate or auto vertical searches that show up with a map takes the visitor to the website hosting the listing, and not the intermediate page in Google Base. Presently, Google does not display advertising on these search result pages, and of course it is not yet known how the company may try to monetize these listings in the future.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
