While the National Association of REALTORS® is planning to launch its own national property database sometime next year, Google seems to have just stolen the NAR’s thunder. How? By rolling out individual “place pages” for every property that’s listed in Google Maps. Like this one for a home in Seattle:

The real estate listing place pages include property information, photos, map placement, Street View imagery and functionality, nearby public transit details, and even AdWords ads. Google has added links for “Directions” and “Search nearby,” as well as a “Send” link that opens an outgoing email with the place page link embedded inside. The property details in the example above are sourced from two separate Prudential Real Estate web sites, and from NWSource.com, which is the Seattle Times’ web site. It’s all presented just as you’d see on any standard MLS web site, though it lacks some of the deep information (such as square footage of individual rooms) available in a typical MLS listing.

There’s no announcement of this new feature yet on the Google LatLong blog, but it was announced today on the official Google Australia blog. That post says the real estate place pages may also include things like videos and inspection times. Left unsaid is that the place page format gives Google the space and flexibility to add new types of information in the future.

Google Maps has, of course, shown individual property information for some time. But it was relegated to the old, small, somewhat user-unfriendly info pop-up windows. The new place pages offer more information, are more user-friendly, and have short, clean links (like http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=18428966863334951733) that home buyers can easily pass around.

It’s the latest in a string of upgrades that Google has made to how it presents real estate information in Google Maps. For more, see Land Grab: Google Expands Real Estate Listings from July and Google Maps Makes Real Estate Search More Visible from last month. Add them all together, along with other updates that are sure to come, and it’s obvious Google is on its way to building what amounts to a national MLS-like database of property listings.

Saying the host site was serving malware to users, Google has removed a controversial photo of First Lady Michelle Obama from Google Image Search. The site itself, however, remains listed in Google web search results without any visible malware warning.

Welcome to the murky world of free speech, politics, and Google.

It began last week, when Search Engine Roundtable pointed out a racist image showing as the number one result in Google Image Search for the term [Michelle Obama]. The image was apparently removed yesterday.

In a Google Web Search Help Forum thread discussing the image, a Google employee named Jem explained yesterday that there are three reasons why Google would remove content from its index:

“… Google views the integrity of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results, or images from our Google Images results, simply because the content is in very poor taste or because we receive complaints concerning it. We will, however, remove pages from our results if we believe the image, page (or its site) violates our Webmaster Guidelines, if we believe we are required to do so by law, or at the request of the webmaster who is responsible for the image.“

(emphasis mine)

An offensive photo of Michelle Obama doesn’t obviously violate any of those three guidelines on its own. Google’s press office has yet to respond to our request for an official statement. But in the comments of today’s Search Engine Roundtable post, Google’s Matt Cutts says the site was violating Google’s webmaster guidelines:

“… that page did violate our webmaster guidelines because it was serving malware to users, which violates the quality guideline that says ‘Don’t create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.’ I believe that the Images team did a general anti-malware sweep.”

Sure enough, a [site:] search for the site in Google Images produces no results. But the malware sweep apparently didn’t reach the main web search index. As Michael Gray points out on SER, the site itself is still listed in Google.com search results with no malware warning.

Making matters slightly murkier is that, as you see above, the image was hosted on Google’s own blogging platform.

Google’s critics will no doubt call this favoritism toward the Obama administration and be quick to point out the company’s ties to Washington, DC. Google CEO Eric Schmidt endorsed Obama for president, later campaigned with him, and then turned down an offer to join the administration. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Google was the fourth-largest corporate contributor to Obama’s presidential campaign. And we’ve reported about a few notable Google employees who’ve left to work for the Obama administration.

On the other hand, we’ve also written more than once about potential friction between Google and the Obama administration. Christine Varney, the Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust has been quoted as saying that Google “has acquired a monopoly in internet online advertising.” See our stories Will Obama Be The Downfall Of Google? and Google’s Anti-Trust Problem Appears Very Real for more.

If, in fact, the blog hosting the offensive image of Michelle Obama also hosts malware, Google’s removal of the image seems justified in light of the company’s stated policies. But, in that case, a malware warning should also be placed on the site itself in Google’s main search results. Until that happens — and perhaps even after — Google’s critics are likely to question the decision to remove this image.

While today’s episode may be a case of Google looking for an excuse to remove an image from the index, it should be said that the same exact image of the First Lady can be found on other sites and remains in Google Image Search because those sites apparently don’t meet the criteria for content removal. There are similarly offensive images of the President himself that can be found quite easily in Google Image Search, too.

Backtracking on a controversial decision earlier this year, the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) has adopted a new policy that allows real estate professionals to have their sites — including home listings that belong to others — indexed by search engines.

The controversy reached a peak this year when the NAR agreed with a local decision in Indianapolis that said real estate agents couldn’t let Google and other search engines index the property listings on their sites if those listings belonged to other brokers/agents. In March, the Indianapolis board sent a letter to some agents that essentially called search engines “scraper” sites:

“…the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) is in agreement with our interpretation of the policy that the above described practice of ‘indexing your Web site’ as you have called it, is a method of scraping or reproducing the data”

At their meeting this week, the NAR Board of Directors revised its policy on home listings and search engines to say that participants “are not required to prevent indexing of their Web sites by recognized search engines.”

That Realtor.org link is also interesting for its comments about the development of REALTORS® Property Resource, which many say is essentially a national search engine for property listings.

Confirming our previous reports, Google has announced and explained why and when it’s showing breadcrumb navigation in its search results.

Google says it may show these site heirarchies “for a small percentage of search results” when it improves the search snippet with more context about the link being pointed to. What’s pretty cool is that each link in the green breadcrumb is clickable, giving searches immediate access to different pages on the listed web site.

A new version of Google Earth for the iPhone is due soon, and among its new features is one with a personal touch: the ability to see maps you’ve created and/or saved in Google Maps. To make this happen, the new Google Earth iPhone app will add the ability to login to your Google account — a feature that could open up additional personalization doors in the future.

Google’s announcement today includes an example from product manager Dan Birch using the new feature to track a pair of attempts to summit Mount Ritter, in which the combination of GPS, KML, and My Maps were used together to show the summit attempts on the Google Earth iPhone app.

A more down-to-earth (pardon the pun) improvement aims to help users get through the sometimes cluttered combination of business listings, Panoramio photos, Wikipedia entries, and other icons that appear in the iPhone app.

When a user touches icons that are too close, a new screen will show them in list format for easier selection of the desired data type.

Finally, the new Google Earth iPhone app is now available in 31 languages, up from 18 in the original release.

Google says the app should be available in the next 24 hours.

Switzerland is taking Google to court over privacy concerns related to Google’s Street View service. The BBC reports that Swiss privacy official Hanspeter Thuer is leading the country’s case.

Mr Thuer is especially concerned about people shown in sensitive locations such as hospitals, prisons or schools.

He also said that the height of the camera was problematic because it allowed a view over fences, hedges and walls, meaning that more could be seen from Street View than by a normal passer-by.

Google reps and Thuer met back in August shortly after Street View launched in that country, and Thuer demanded then that Google “immediately withdraw its online service Google Street View concerning Switzerland.” Thuer says Google has not complied with Switzerland’s demands.

The BBC quotes a Google official as saying the company will “vigorously contest” the lawsuit.

For more on Google’s similar, ongoing legal battles around the world, see our Google: Street View archives.

Google has announced an upgrade to the Keywords report that’s available in Webmaster Tools. The report now features a daily update of the most common keywords that Google found while crawling a web site.

And each keyword is linked to another report that details up to “10 top pages” where the keyword was found.

It’s a nice improvement over the previous Keywords report, but if I’m being picky, I wish it wouldn’t just show one-word keywords. Seems like there would be even more value in surfacing multiple-word combinations here.

Not wanting to be overshadowed by today’s Bing / Walfram Alpha collaboration, Google has announced the addition of World Bank data to its search results … or, as Danny Sullivan said on Twitter, “we got structured data, too.”

Google says it’s now pulling in 17 World Development Indicators from the World Bank, and uses a search for internet users in the united states as an example.

Clicking on the chart in that search result leads to a data comparison tool to show several countries at the same time. Plus, those charts can be embedded on other web pages. (In other words, “Touché, Bing and Wolfram Alpha!”)

The full list of 17 indicators is included in Google’s blog post.

While Bing is happily rolling out new search features, Microsoft can also smile at the latest search engine market share report from Experian Hitwise.

Google is still light years ahead of Yahoo, Bing, and Ask … but Experian Hitwise shows Bing with a 7% increase during October, while both Google and Yahoo saw small drops in search share.

Experian Hitwise also updates some stats related to search queries:

“Longer search queries, averaging searches of five to more than eight words in length, increased 3 percent between October and September 2009. Searches of eight or more words increased 4 percent. The same time period showed that shorter search queries – those averaging one to four words long – decreased 1 percent from month to month.”

Postscript: Enquisite has published its own research on search engine referral data. It shows Google even further ahead of Yahoo, Bing, et al. But this chart tracks click thrus from each search engine, not the number of searches done.

There’s a lot of news today coming out of Bing headquarters, perhaps most notably that the long-rumored partnership with Wolfram Alpha is finally coming to fruition.

Bing’s announcement today explains that the collaboration will cover two specific areas: nutritional information and mathematics.

Nutritional Data

With help from Wolfram Alpha, Bing says it can now help users make smarter diet choices. When searching for specific food items, searchers will see a new Nutrition tab that offers more information. And at the bottom of the search results page, Bing will show the nutrition facts labels — the kind you see on product packaging.

Bing is also pulling in a Body Mass Index calculator from Wolfram Alpha that lets user learn about BMI within Bing’s search results.

Mathematics Data

This is where we all expected any Bing-Wolfram Alpha partnership to be revealed: using Bing’s search box to get the kind of computational results and data that Wolfram Alpha is perhaps best known for.

These new Wolfram-powered features will roll out in the U.S. “over the next several days.” Bing has also posted three short video interview clips with Wolfram Alpha founder Stephen Wolfram talking about their partnership.

State of the search engine

In a separate blog post, Bing has shared what amounts to a “state of the search engine” report. In it, Bing recaps and reveals some of the new features and tools that have been added since its May/June launch and talks about what Bing has learned from usage patterns and focus group testing.

The new features include

• quicker access to Bing’s popular travel search features from the Bing.com home page
• faster access to flight search and listings data
• new “city results pages” with important information about popular attractions, city photos, local neighborhoods and more
• new “page preview” features, including pulling contact information from a web page and showing it in Bing’s search results previews
• new “event search” functionality with categorized events for “major cities”
• a “search sharing” tool for product results that lets users send a result to friends via email or on Facebook/Twitter
• new search results for some health-related queries, with more information and newly organized sets of results

As with the Wolfram Alpha integration, Bing says these new features will start to show up in search results over the next “several days.”