Mooreover / Blog

I spent the latter part of the evening publishing a classified ad for one of my listings on craigslist.org. For those that may not be aware, Craigslist is an online classified ads site that allows users to post for free. When we were trying to find my replacement at my last job, my boss posted an ad in the local newspaper and got ONE response in a week’s time. We then posted the same “help wanted” ad on Craigslist and had four resumes within an hour.

Anyhoo – it took me a little while to get it to represent the way that I wanted, but before long I had posted my ad for 2.34 Acres in Sultan Basin with Mountain Views. There are a few (and when I say a few, I mean a lot…) agents that do the same thing in the Seattle area, so there are a few hundred ads for real estate within my market. Still, it’s a little exposure for my listing, and it didn’t cost me anything more than a little time.

Then, as I was checking on stock prices, I noticed an article about Google’s stock going over $400/share. Within that article I found an link to a new service that Google is providing, which sounds very similar to Craigslist. It’s called Google Base, and while I haven’t had a chance to peruse it at length, it looks like it will take some time before it becomes as user-friendly as Craigslist. One of the things that helps Google’s advertisers (to some degree at the expense of its consumers) is Google’s ability to tie in advertising across all of its services. For instance, a search for an address within Google will locate a map to the property, along with flags indicating the locale of nearby services (that have paid for the exposure), as well as a link to their website. I imagine that this will also true of Google Base (if not now, eventually). While Craigslist allows you to navigate throughout the use of “folders,” Google is extending their bet that people will soon abandon their reliance on navigation, and instead, depend on the reliability of keyword searches to find what they need in the shortest amount of time.

For example: if I wanted to find my posting on Craigslist, from the home page I would click on “Seattle.” From there I would click on “housing,” then on “real estate for sale.” On Google Base, I would merely go to the home page and type in a search for “Seattle real estate.” The next page would be my results page, probably organized by key word relevance.

I probably made this more elementary than it needed to be, but the readership of this blog is very broad in their technical know-how. I am a huge fan of Google, but I still haven’t been able to cross over completely to keyword searches over folder navigation. It works for me when I’m shopping online – I love that I can go to Froogle.com and do a search for the item I want and it will bring up all of the places that I can buy it online, and at what price, so I don’t have to waste time going to each of those sites independently. However, this need does not extend to my email. I take some solace knowing that I can separate my friend’s emails from spam into tidy folders, thereby protecting them from the evil that invades my Inbox.

Anyway – that’s my rant. Hopefully you learned something today that you didn’t know before. Otherwise I just used up my word quota for the day for no good reason Here is my posting on Google Base, advertising the same vacant land listing.