Posted in Menacing Monopoly

Google begins attack on Zillow

Look out, Zillow, Google wants to eat your lunch:

Zillow better watch out: The latest thing to emerge from Google's barrage of launches this week duplicates one of the Seattle startup's most valuable features.

Google is now offering an instant mortgage quote service that instantly connects lenders to buyers, and provides useful tools for comparison shopping. It also instantly estimates house values (a Gestimate?) provided by IntelliReal.

Just another “free” product that Google can use to mine information from out of people. It's really amazing that so few people seem concerned about Google's relentless march into people's personal lives. If Google was the government, libertarians everywhere would be running around screaming about this. But not too many libertarians seem too concerned about Google. Something they should keep in mind: A massive corporation isn't much different than the government.

It's time people started caring about what Google is doing with the data it's collecting from them. And the profiles it is building from that data.