Google Scares me.

Posted on October 26, 2005 by Jim Duncan

Inman News – Real Estate News and Advice for Buyers, Sellers & Investors:

What is Google up to? A screenshot of what appears to be a new Google service in the works called Google Base appeared on a Dutch blogger’s site, Seweso.com. Click here to see the screenshot. On Monday, another blogger reported discovering a new Google subdomain, base.google.com, though nothing appears at that address today.  … If speculators are accurate, it looks like a user-tagged searchable item database. The interesting part for real estate is that the screenshot shown on the Dutch blogger’s site shows a page where the user enters information about a real estate listing.

This kind of scares me, from an industry point of view. Google scares me. Waldo found this article.

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About Jim Duncan

A Charlottesville Realtor who tries to stay on the bleeding/cutting/functional edge of technology and real estate trends. I have been selling real estate for the past 10 years, lived in C'Ville for twenty+ and am married to one of few Charlottesville natives left.
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  • me

    Do you want to say *why* it scares you? What’s the point of having a blog if you don’t write anything coherent?

  • http://www.jduncanrealestate.com Jim

    Dear “me” if that is your real name –

    Google’s attempts to acquire virtually all the information, basically in this world, digitizing it and making it searchable by anybody frightens me. Knowledge truly is power, and I see them becoming almost borg-like in their quest and thirst for information storage.

    From an industry standpoint, the real estate industry has done a good job of doing the same thing as google – creating a good information source – the MLS – and maintaining control to a limited number of people. Google’s move into this arena threatens not just the MLS, but many other industries as well –

    eBay, Craigslist, and classified ads. Users will be able upload all kinds of items for sale, and you’ll be able to geo-locate them, compare them, and search them via Google. Think about it. When using eBay or Craigslist, how often do you think “I wish I could search this with Google”? Recall, too, that Google has a payments service in the works.

    From the above-referenced article.

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