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.

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{ 3 comments }

me October 26, 2005 at 10:51

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 October 26, 2005 at 11:28

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 October 26, 2005 at 15:25

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

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