

Retiring real estate on Google Maps - dlewis
http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2011/01/retiring-real-estate-on-google-maps.html

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pchristensen
While I agree that there are better sites for looking at _for-sale_ real
estate, Google Maps was by far the best place for finding rentals for our
recent move into the city of Chicago from the suburbs. I'll be sad to see it
go, until a better apartment search consolidator pops up.

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pmchiu
I'm a huge fan of PadMapper. Does a great job for apartment search. Far better
than what Google Maps was doing. <http://www.padmapper.com>

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bane
"In part due to low usage, the proliferation of excellent property-search
tools on real estate websites, and the infrastructure challenge posed by the
impending retirement of the Google Base API (used by listing providers to
submit listings),"

Whatever happened to wanting to make all the world's data searchable?

Reasons 2 and 3 are pure cop outs.

Google has a real problem in that they seem to not be able to produce a best-
in-breed class of software for highly competitive areas. If somebody came out
with better search tomorrow would they just drop it?

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ericd
Hm, I didn't realize they were also deprecating the Base API in favor of
vertical APIs. I suppose they're pulling back from their ambition to create an
overarching taxonomy of everything in a single API?

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pmchiu
Based on this move I wonder how much truth there ever was to the rumor that
Google was considering buying Trulia
([http://kara.allthingsd.com/20091218/open-house-google-has-
al...](http://kara.allthingsd.com/20091218/open-house-google-has-also-been-
eying-trulia-in-real-estate-search-play/)). The infrastructure they have is
basically the same so they would have encountered the same infrastructure
issues with the retirement of Google Base.

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kreek
It seems like Google is giving up on real estate by dropping the Base API.
There is a new shopping API but it doesn't include real estate. I can remember
when Base came out six years ago that it was going to "be the death of MLS".
Yet now Base is going and we still have little pockets of data only available
to Realtors.

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rafamvc
Redfin does a good job showing info. (where redfin is anyhow)

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btipling
I didn't even know that feature existed.

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Vivtek
The low usage was due to the fact that nobody even knew it was there. I
_always_ watch real estate, and only saw these on Google Maps once. (And was
instantly enamored, and now it's going away. Sigh.)

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kazuya
Heh, less than half a year since they started the service in Japan.

Are they going to acquire a company specialized in real estate search to
replace it?

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davidw
Makes sense. They were never really going to compete with specialists like
zillow.com.

