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?