Quite a few of us would have used the Google Real Estate portal while buying or selling real estate properties. These listings, which are either got through web-crawling or when real estate agents submit their listings are absolutely free. The only way Google monetizes the properties is through text-based advertisements on the sidebar and at the bottom of the map-based listings.
Now, it appears that the company is working on technology that will bring advertisements right into the map. In a recently filed patent titled “Claiming Real Estate in Panoramic or 3D Mapping Environments for Advertising”, the company explains how the ad-bidding system for real estate advertising will work. In the patent, Google writes
“Techniques for identifying groups of features in an online geographic view of a real property and replacing and/or augmenting the groups of features with advertisement information are described. The techniques include providing a geographic view of a property within an online property management system, identifying a region of interest in the geographic view, analyzing the geographic view to locate one or more promotional features within the geographic view positioned upon a real property region, providing a user-selectable link associated with the region of interest in the geographic view, receiving a request for the region of interest in the geographic view via the user-selectable link, receiving data to alter at least one of the behavior or the appearance of the region of interest, storing the data in association with the geographic view, and updating the region of interest within the geographic view based upon the received data.”
The patent talks elaborately about how the advertisers’ dashboard shall work and how the system will work to display the sponsored listings.
The system will apparently work on the basis of how popular a particular real estate property is. It is not clear if the advertisement will appear across a locality or shall be tagged alongside a particular real estate property.
You might remember that this is not the first time Google is introducing sponsored listings on Google Maps. Such ads are already available on generic map views. However, it appears that this will be the first time when these listings will also be made available on real estate listings.
3 replies on “Google Working On Introducing Map-View Advertisements”
Wrong patent, muchacho. You linked to one about “indexing”.
Don’t take this the wrong way: the two bloggers who linked to your post also either copied your error without checking, or made their own error.
Way to go, blogosphere.
You should actually blame USPTO..They have a weird way of changing the URLs of patent application every other week..
Map view advertisements will change how people do business on Google. I have to wonder if it will be search based or IP based. I suspect IP based would make sense unless one is looking for a specific business or locality.