Retiring real estate on Google Maps

At Google one of our key philosophies is to take risks and to experiment. To that end, in July 2009 we announced the ability to find property for sale or rent directly on Google Maps. This is one of the “search options” next to the search box on Google Maps, and is currently available in the US, Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Japan.
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), we’ve decided to discontinue the real estate feature within Google Maps on February 10, 2011.
We’ve learned a lot and been excited to see real estate companies use Google Maps in innovative ways to help people find places to live, such as Coldwell Banker’s use of Google Maps and YouTube, or Realtor.com’s Android app that lets you draw a shape on a map to find all properties you’re interested in.
Yet we recognize that there might be better, more effective ways to help people find local real estate information than the current feature makes possible. We’ll continue to explore this area, but in the meantime, Google offers other options to home-seekers: you can still access other information in Maps such as local businesses, directions and transit times, as well as aerial and Street View imagery to explore where you might want to move, and also use Google search results to find helpful real estate information and websites.
Real estate companies can also continue to use tools from Google to help connect with buyers and renters who use the Internet to research properties. For example, companies can use the Google Maps API to embed customized maps that are useful to potential clients right on their own web pages. Our Google for real estate professionals site contains various methods for generating leads and improving real estate business operations.

Googlers Down Under


Despite the recent flooding in Brisbane, Australia, linux.conf.au (lca) will proceed from January 24th to 29th, and Googlers from across the company will be there. LCA is a community-run technical conference for free and open source software enthusiasts, featuring but not limited to Linux. In addition to the many Googlers who will be attending, several Googlers will also be presenting at the conference.

The conference starts on Monday the 24th with a day of miniconfs, and Nóirín Shirley from Google’s Zurich office will be presenting “Open Source: Saving the World” as part of the Haecksen track.

Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf will start the day on Tuesday the 25th with his keynote presentation, and later that morning he will present “In Search of Transmission Capacity – a Multicore Dilemma.” On Tuesday afternoon, Google Summer of Code Administrator Carol Smith will give a “Google Summer of Code Update” at the FOSS in Research and Student Innovation Miniconf.

On Wednesday January 26th, Google staff engineer and Linux kernel committer Ted Ts’o will explain “Making file systems scale: A case study using ext4.”

Andrew Gerrand and Nigel Tao of the Go team will give attendees “A Tour of Go” on Thursday the 27th, and Nóirín will present “Baby Steps into Open Source – Incubation and Mentoring at Apache,” which is based on her experience at the Apache Software Foundation.

On Friday the 28th, Carol will present her talk, “The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Project Managers” in the morning. A little later in the day, Daniel Bentley and Daniel Nadasi of the open source and Geo teams respectively will talk about “Opening a Closed World,” followed by Marc MERLIN, who works on infrastructure at Google. Marc will discuss “Saving Money with Misterhouse: Running Your Lights and HVAC System. Scaring your cat off the kitchen counter is just a bonus 🙂”

LCA always closes with Open Day, a free day-long event where the general public can leearn about open source, open data – all things “open”. The Open Day is on Saturday the 29th, and Cat Allman of the Open Source Programs Office will be presenting her talk, “What is Open Source?” there.

Come learn more about the latest happenings in open source, and join us in showing support for Brisbane’s recovery. We hope to see you there!

Let Your Hotpot Friends Help You Search on Google Maps

Most of us know lots of friends, each with very different areas of expertise when it comes to places to recommend. With the recent launch of Hotpot, we made it easy for you to see your friends’ ratings and reviews listed right inside search results.

While this is really helpful, and we’ve had a lot of fun with it, we often found ourselves wanting to see all recommendations by a particular friend for a particular search. Problem solved, thanks to a simple new feature we cooked up.

Say I’m searching on Google Maps for “italian restaurants” in New York. I’d probably trust my buddy Octavian’s recommendations over Bernhard’s (who is more of a hamburger guy, really). Now all I have to do, to see Octavian’s entire list of Italian restaurant recommendations in the city, is click on his name when he pops up in my initial search; this filters my search results to only those he’s rated and shows them on the map. It’s like I’m seeing the world, through Octavian’s eyes.

Getting a hand from a friend is even more helpful when I’m on the go. So now I can do the same thing in Google Maps for mobile on Android; clicking on Octavian’s name in my search results filters to show only his recommendations.

Add your friends (at least those with good taste) on Hotpot and encourage them to rate so you can explore their recommendations when you search on Google Maps.