Google Maps Scraps Property Search

 

Google Maps have announced they are dropping property, despite it being under a year since they launched their gambit into the property portal market.

The move came as a shock to the industry, upon Google's sudden announcement that the property search feature will be scrapped in all the countries where it operates (including the UK) on 10 February 2011.

In a low-key statement online, Google vice president Brian McClendon announced that the company's experiment is over, stating: “One of our key philosophies is to take risks and to experiment. To that end, in July 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.”  

Rightmove was one of the websites which decided not to strike deals with the search engine and shares in the company went through the roof on Google's announcement reaching an all-time high of £8.18.

 

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