Google Goes After Real Estate, But Has a Long Way to Go
I don’t know what’s up with Google lately, but there have been a couple of big launches that aren’t quite ready for prime time. Google Squared was released, pretty much as an answer to Wolfram Alpha, but it needs a ton of work.
Now, they’ve launched real estate search in Google Maps, but it’s mostly a big dud. Realtor.com, Zillow.com, and Trulia.com are still way better and I absolutely wouldn’t recommend ditching them to make Google your primary real estate search.
Of course, we can’t discount Google either. They obviously rock the house on so many other products. But I guess because of this I expect a lot more from them.
I entered the search just the way they said you should: “homes for sale in Columbus, OH.”
When the results come up, you have to click again to get the real estate search. That should come up right away. Kill the extra click.
Notice that when I refine my search, I see no searches from any of the top 5 real estate sites. According to Hitwise, they are:
Also, for Google’s real estate search, I’d like to see the option of displaying more than 10 results before having to click to the next page of results. I think when it comes to real estate search, possibly more than other searches, users are going to be considering many more options because the investment is so large and the factors to consider in the purchase decision are so many.
But hey, that’s just my opinion. Disagree? Think Google real estate search rocks? Leave a comment and tell me how it is.