Google Scares me.

by Jim Duncan on October 26, 2005

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.

Technorati Tags:

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or sign up for Email Alerts. This blog tracks the real estate market in the Charlottesville, Virginia region, local politics, technology and other matters impacting the local real estate market. Thanks for visiting!

{ 3 comments }

me 10.26.05 at 10:51 am

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

Jim 10.26.05 at 11:28 am

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.

sean tubbs 10.26.05 at 3:25 pm

Here’s another article on the topic from today’s NYTimes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/26/technology/26google.html?ex=1287979200&en=c7a1d522ee327fe0&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Comments on this entry are closed.