We’re constantly evaluating how our website and applications are performing, paying special attention to reactions from our customers. In the case of our Google Chrome App, usage has been limited and it hasn’t been getting much love from consumers, so we have made the decision to discontinue it. Of course, you can continue to search homes for sale on redfin.com, as well as our iOS and Android apps.

***End of Update***

There’s a new, faster way to search for homes without having to type ‘www.redfin.com’ into your address bar or click your Redfin bookmark! Our Redfin Search App, now available for Google Chrome, integrates the power of Redfin right into your browser and allows you to search for homes from anywhere on the internet. Here’s how it works:

• Type ‘rf’ plus a neighborhood, city, street address or MLS# into the address bar to search for it on Redfin.  We’ll even auto-complete your search term for you if we can!

• Highlight and right-click on an address or location on any webpage and select ‘Search Redfin for…’
  

It’s pretty simple, but incredibly useful. So head to the chrome web store using Google Chrome, download Redfin Search, and start searching!

As always, we’d love to hear what you think about our new apps and features. Feel free to leave a note here or send an email to feedback@redfin.com.

The post Search Homes and ‘Hoods Even Faster with our Google Chrome App! appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

In fact, someone over at Google must feel like the coach of Cuba’s national baseball team. Of the 2,174 current Facebook employees with a LinkedIn profile, 378 cited Google in their work history, or nearly 1 in 5.  What’s remarkable about their decision isn’t the aplomb of Facebook recruiting, but the lack of imagination of Facebook’s Google recruits.

What’s the point of leaving one unassailable Internet platform where all your friends work for another unassailable Internet platform where all your friends work? It’s like getting a divorce to marry your wife’s sister.

I know, because I’ve been the wife in that situation before. When a colleague at a startup joined a competitor, my old partner Kirill Sheynkman had a very different reaction from mine. The colleague’s defection seemed shockingly traitorous to me but to Kirill, it was much worse: it was boring.

“You spend years working on database query tools, only to say ‘I’m sick of it, I quit’ and join a database query tools company,” Kirill said. “Where’s the imagination?” Forget the banality of evil, what galled Kirill was the evil of banality.

To someone at Google, perhaps the choice doesn’t seem banal because the two companies seem different: Google has its own dance studio, whereas Facebook only washes employee’s clothes. Google wants to become a dominant social network, and Facebook already is a dominant social network.  But to someone at a true startup, the two kind of look the same. Both will succeed without you.

Of course, Facebook is one of the few truly great Internet companies, and it’s easy to understand why anyone would want to work there. But if you’re going to leave the security of the world’s greatest software company, why not leave to try something hard, something raw, something completely different? A successful run at Google is the Silicon Valley equivalent of diplomatic immunity in Lethal Weapon 2:  every venture capitalist wants to give you money and any startup wants to hire you.

You could help someone who actually needs it, you could do something that hasn’t been done before. If you fail, you won’t be poor, and you won’t be unemployed long. I’ve heard Facebook is hiring.

(Update: some folks at Facebook have taken me to task for the tongue-in-cheek headline calling out their creativity. I’m sorry. I hadn’t meant that seriously. The people moving between Google and Facebook are obviously the gods of Silicon Valley, people who belong on bubble-gum trading cards. And just judging by its product you can tell that Facebook is a stunningly creative company.

I really, really love Facebook, and love Google, too. I just always hope that the best engineers at both places, when it’s their time to leave, do so to work at a tiny startup or to start their own company. Deciding otherwise is understandable of course: the pay at a newer company is speculative, the hours are maybe worse than Facebook’s, but it’s a different kind of fun, feeling like the whole place would keel over if you didn’t do your part.)

The post One in Five Facebook Employees Has No Imagination Whatsoever appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

And my guess is that more people will use Google to navigate directly to the desired spot within a site, rather than simply to find the right site. Each site on the Web will have less influence over how the consumer moves through that site, and the consumer will have more control.

This is a big change that began earlier with Google Mobile and Google Chrome’s address-bar search but it’s coming into full view now. For example, as you type Redfin into Google, the first search result will be the home page of Redfin’s website. But Google will suggest that you search on Redfin Seattle, Redfin blog, Redfin San Francisco, encouraging you to bypass the Redfin home page entirely. This is more efficient, and better for you as a user.

As Google accumulates more data on user preferences, the suggested queries will become increasingly precise, and users will rely on those suggested queries not just to save them the trouble of typing out what they want, but even of figuring out what they want.

Prompted by Google, we’ll also tend to follow in one another’s footsteps, rather than blazing our own trail. As the distance between the collective brain and our own brain shrinks, and as web searching becomes indistinguishable from thinking — every year, I spend less time considering any problem before issuing my first Google search  – our thinking will more quickly fall into familiar patterns.

Suggesting well-worn paths for further investigation is exactly what a home page does, but now Google runs that home page  for all the websites that Google users access. The storytelling that many websites want to engage their audience in, beginning with one web page that guides users to the next page and the next, will become a choose-your-own-adventure book assembled by Google, where users are liable to start on any given page, and move from site to site.

For Redfin this means that we have to tell the story of our company on every web page, whether that page is about homes for sale in Seattle or a blog post about Case-Shiller data, almost like the tattooed amnesiac in Memento. If Redfin didn’t have map-based search with a large number of specialized filters on bedrooms and bathrooms, we’d probably have to consider going further, using Google as the front-end for listing search, reducing our own site to a giant set of listing web pages.

By that rationale,  the entire Web would become a static, simple content repository designed to be indexed in Google, not a series of sites each used in an interactive or graphical way on its own. But that isn’t likely to happen. Companies have data on how their own sites are used that Google doesn’t. And social networks are sharing information with those sites about the friends we have with similar tastes. Already, plenty of sites show me which products and pages my friends liked, and what my history suggests about what I’ll like in the future too.

As Google gets smarter, the web it indexes has to get smarter, too. And the poor old home page will either become personalized, socialized or bypassed entirely.

The post Google Instant and The End of the Homepage appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

But the author sort of misses the point. He worries that Google is using its power to screw Yahoo, AOL or Microsoft (where he probably works), not the consumer. He talks about sinister scenarios where Google arbitrarily refuses to run an ad, or dongs companies that don’t advertise from its search results. These scenarios either don’t seem likely or worrisome to me.

And more to the point, we don’t have to imagine such abuses of power; the Internet has already changed in literally billions of ways to accommodate Google. Overwhelmingly, Google has made the Internet a more organized, consumer-friendly place. But any mass of that size operating at the center of the Internet, however sunny and life-giving it may be, can’t help but deform it in unnatural ways, too.

This is a concern we first raised in April, arguing in an essay about how newspapers compete in the Google age that Google’s ability to shape the Internet is far more complete and long-lasting than Microsoft’s supposed monopoly of the desktop. I hope Bing will begin to change that, though I have been less impressed than others by its 8% jump in traffic, simply because some of that has been driven by one-time press hits and ads.

The fact is that every day, people make web pages dumber so Google can index them. At last Thursday’s Naked Truth, Jonathan Sposato talked about how Picnik is largely invisible to Google because Picnik is coded in Flash, a platform that allows you to do magical things to photos from a web browser  – but one which Google’s robots still don’t really understand. What this means is that Picnik in some ways is too smart for Google –and pays the price, getting very little very traffic from search. It should come as no surprise then that fewer and fewer web applications have followed Picnik’s suit, even though as consumers we often wish they would.

For our part, Redfin just had a debate on Friday about whether to optimize our site for consumers or for Google. At stake was how to provide home-buying tips within our search application. One option is as a link to a separate web page. The other option is in-line, so that users can click on a control to see more information within the context of their search.  The first option is Google-friendly, because the indexing robot doesn’t know how to click for more info, it can mostly only follow links. The second option is user-friendly, because most consumers don’t want their search interrupted while another page loads.

I think we’ll end up choosing the user-friendly option this time, but really the conversation shouldn’t even be happening. And it happens all the time, at Redfin and everywhere else. Just last year, we argued about how many similar listings to show on a given listing web page; users would prefer to see five similar listings but Google doesn’t mind if we show 20 or 50. The more similar listings we show, the more probably can get indexed. Today, we show 10 similar listings.

The differences go beyond how information is presented. Google doesn’t like websites that charge money, or limit information only to registered users. To show some broker’s listings, Redfin has to register users. Google’s robots can’t sign up for a Redfin account, and never see or index that information.

Some websites, like ZipRealty, register users to see details on every listing, so that Zip can follow up with a sales call or email. And I am very happy to report that Google punishes them for it. This is one reason why Redfin has  been growing traffic faster than Zip. And it’s one reason that newspapers haven’t been able to charge users money, because Google won’t index content that it can’t show for free. This makes me unhappy, because some information is worth paying for.

So to Google, you’re either a media company, a website that displays information like a media company, or you’re somewhat invisible. Another way of thinking about this is that Google forces every website to be the braun — providing different types of information in a simple format its robots can understand — while Google itself is the brain, acting as the central hub for people to find their  way to information. When we optimize our site for Google, we are enthusiastically out-sourcing more and more of our brain. Another way of saying this is that as more and more people access the listings on Redfin’s site via Google search, our home page is increasingly not  a Redfin page, but a Google search page.

In many ways, I think this is a good thing, as it gives consumers the freedom to move from site to site using Google as a well-known guide. But we should at least acknowledge that all websites are now building themselves to be understood by one search engine. If you have to choose one company as the least common denominator for the entire Internet, you could no better than Google, but it is after all still only one company.

The post Is It User-Friendly or Google-Friendly? appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.