I recently came across a new development in Local Search from Google to highlight Real Estate Searches where you can see both Houses for Sale and Houses for Rent. It is a very powerful tool and it has the potential to change the way people look for Real Estate.
Google has something called Google Base where they are developing general and vertical search markets to sell products. They have a vertical called Google Base for Real Estate. Thru Google Base, you can upload listings to their maps. Many big databases like HomeHound and RealEstate.com are already uploading content to Google now; so many Real Estate agents are displayed in results today and probably don’t even realize it.
What’s this got to do with Accommodation?
Well, I would guess that there are a number of vertical markets that Google will target and Travel is very obviously of interest. Microsoft’s search engine Bing targets travel with suggestions for flights and accommodation – all linked to their travel services and others that pay for placement in results.
Access to sell through Bing will probably go through channels that many small accommodation providers won’t typically use such as Expedia. Perhaps Wotif or others will also make deals to display their content.
Will Google maintain it’s unbiased results? Are search results meant to display the most relevant content or the content that makes the search engine money? I suspect Google will not blatantly get into sales – at least I hope not.
Google Base and Google’s Local Business Center give small businesses tools add their content to results. So they won’t be excluded if they don’t use listing services, but naturally this means business owners need to stay on top of what is happening.
There are options now to add Travel Packages to Google Base. Packages are different than a general accommodation listing because they have an expiry date and must be constantly updated. There are a number of ways to maintain updates. I haven’t seen them show up in general search results, but it will happen. For now, I’m waiting to see results.
I’ll keep a look out for anything new with Google Base. It is a sleeper that may pop up with new challenges that we should watch carefully.
Interesting, am looking at this for hotels that we market in paris. Will keep an eye on your blog for any updates.