Google says it’s no evil empire.
Google’s Director of Local and B2B Markets Sam Sebastian addressed apartment marketing in late April during the AIM Conference, which welcomed Internet marketing professionals.
Having heard rumors that Google was on the acquisition hunt in regard to real estate search sites, AIM attendees were leery of Google stepping on their business models, especially given its interest in mobile advertising network AdMob.
When asked, Sebastian didn’t side-step the issue, but instead politely responded: “We’re working with some apartment listing sites to get their data. Google doesn’t have a lot of this information, so we’re getting it and organizing it to make it more useful for Google users. Our company’s goal is and always has been to enable our users to be one click away from the information that they are looking for. We try to surface the information we have in a meaningful way.
“So no, there’s no ‘evil empire’ plan to take out an industry. If I were you, I wouldn’t be focused on it and I wouldn’t be worried about it.”
Sebastian continued his reassurance, saying: “Buying a real estate search site would be a vertical move. That’s not what we typically do. We’re more into making horizontal acquisitions that support broader initiatives. As a company, we will continue to innovate, and this could create some pressure on others. But we’ve done this very thing since the day our company was founded.” —NAA’s Paul Bergeron