08
2007
Google Base and Real Estate
John Battelle’s post here alerted me to Google’s push in the real estate space. As a search engine, Google plays a dominant role as the #1 source of traffic to the Hitwise U.S. Real Estate category (1,825 sites), providing close to 16% of all traffic to the category (up from 13% a year ago). This chart shows the growth of visits from Google’s main search page to the real estate category.
Google Base is essentially a web-based database engine capable of running a variety of applications. Leveraging Hitwise Clickstream data, we can see which applications are starting to gain traction. For the week ending March 4, 2007, here are the industry categories downstream from Google Base:
Employment 15.7%
Real Estate 13.1%
Auto Classifieds 11.9%
Recipes: 7.1%
Retail: 4.6%
News: 3.4%
Interestingly, Recipe sites were the #1 downstream category this time last year at 13.7%.
While still in its infancy (ranking #2,702 among all Internet sites visited in the U.S. for the week ending March 4, 2007), given the real estate push and other potential areas of growth like employment and automotive, Google Base could provide an interesting marketplace alternative on a number of fronts.
Interesting … keeping a close eye on Employment.
The Google Base system offers many different people the opportunity to create information and spread their “words”…. I would think this would appeal tremendously to Real Estate agents. Real Estate agents gain most of their business through word-of-mouth, so an open forum to share their thoughts, especially on a Google arena, probably excites and entices the agents to post and increase available information.
I’m curious to see if Google eventually takes the leading categories on Google Base and leverages the audiences to other Google ventures. For example, if Real Estates agents frequent the Google Base system, then the agents may be provided with some housing system by Google. Just a thought of where Google may try to develop this product in the future.
I’m one of the people who have spread ‘their words’ with Google Base.
With the help of the excellent helpdesk it took me about a week to ‘bulk upload’ my listings. I’m curious to find out the results of my listings on Google Base. Would be gerat if these listings would be available through Google’s Organic Search.
I’m also busy at the moment with uploading my listings to edgeio.com. This wil take me some more time. Their helpdesk is ok but the documentation on there website was outdated.
I’m located in the Netherlands. Apart from Google base in Germany there not many possibilities to syndicate your content trough sites like Google Base…
Are these stats of google’s from ALL of google or google base? Does anyone know? They are starting to really do a great job with Base. I believe we’ll see it popup more and more within search results.