Content on the web is blossoming. It’s growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people’s expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.

Mikal Belicove asked Googler, Matt Cutts  how this will impact businesses:

“The main difference is that businesses will see searchers arriving faster on their websites because Caffeine can index pages much more quickly than our previous system. The nice thing is that Google users will see fresher results without users (or business owners) needing to do anything special.

Business owners can find ways to put this additional freshness to work for them. For example, owners might want to consider putting limited-time promotions on their website, since people will be able to find those promotions more quickly while they still apply.”

On the surface, the site looks great with a number of listings for various real estate agents and portals, however upon closer inspection there are a couple of noticeable omissions from the listings, namely the two gorillas of online real estate,  realestate.com.au and domain.com.au.

Patrick Stafford from SmartCompany spoke with former chief executive of REA Group, Simon Baker who views Google Maps as a competitor but not a major threat:

“You have to think about this one logically. For this to shake up the market, for it to have real impact on realestate.com.au or domain.com.au, it has to take away visitors to those sites and therefore leads, and then have agents have to stop using them. Firstly, for consumers or visitors to stop using domain.com.au or realestate.com.au, they’re going to have access to an equal number of listings on Google maps. Currently they’re not there yet.”

According to The Real Estate Marketing Maven, agents, franchises, marketing groups, and listing portals can upload their property listings through Google Base, either a formatted data feed or via the Google Base Data API. Listings are then displayed on a map when a user conducts a search using Google Maps.

Although widely adopted overseas, this is the first implementation of Google Base’s functionality in Australia (that we’re aware of).  Is a local version of Google’s Product Search in the works as well?

Reporting a massive 2.7 million people shopping for the month of June, getprice.com.au has seen an increase of traffic of more than 500% to the site from June 2008.

“As one of Australia’s fastest growing websites, we are seeing a huge increase in consumers coming to us to make their money go further,” said getprice.com.au Chief Executive, Chris Hitchen.

“Knowledge is power when making purchase decisions and consumers want to be able to see all their options quickly. This is with good reason too with consumers saving up to 60% by going online and comparing before completing their purchase.”

“From electronics to perfume – www.getprice.com.au can deliver consumers with thousands of product comparisons in a matter of seconds.”

Shopping trends reported by www.getprice.com.au in June:

• Australians are heading indoors to exercise in the winter months with treadmills being the most popular sports and travel product, followed by pilates machines and exercise bikes.
• Panasonic, Cannon and Olympus digital cameras remain extremely popular with their products being in the top ten most search electronic items.
• The traditional trampoline remains the most popular product for Aussie kids, followed by swings and scooters.
• Perfumes such as Gucci Flora by Gucci, Issey Miyake L’Eau D’Issey and Giorgio Armani Acqua were the most popular health and beauty products
• Sony Playstation topped the computer and games category – followed by the Asus EE Laptop, HP Mini 2140 and Acer 5533

Read the full Press Release here