Google wants everyone’s lunch
Wow, Google’s got a new (at least to me, don’t know how new) housing search for google base real estate listings. Search for rentals 10003 or real estate new york (you need to then click on the housing search button) or what have you and lo and behold. Listings. Map.
They give you some decent search parameters, bedrooms, price, etc… This is where Google Base starts to shine when compared to craigslist. Google Base data is structured so it can do some more rangey and interesting searches, where Craigslist starts to show it’s email roots. Ultimately, people will go where the listings are, but this seems like the future to me. I’m looking into a similar project called Freebase, that also tries to organize data in a structured but not predefined fashion. Cool stuff.
Now I don’t know how much data there is in Google base, so I can’t comment on that. But I have a couple minor issues. First, I can’t seem to figure out how to get directly to the housing search. Granted I only spent a minute or two trying to mess around with the url, but still, that should be something obvious. The other problem is that all this javascriptiness seems to have broken the web. Something that I wanted to do constantly, and my hand kept trying to do it even when I knew it wouldn’t work, was right click a listing to open a new window with the data. Since I couldn’t do this I had to just click the link and then hit back when I wanted to come back to the search. When browsing through listings like this, that is really annoying.
Ah well, who knows, Google’s making more moves with base and who knows who’ll win - but it seems they’ve got something pretty good to offer.
