FT cites Douglas & Godon (an estate firm) commercial director Ed Mead as its source, who claims to have spoken with Google about the plans. No comment has been received from Google on the matter.

"It looks very simple. If it stays free, then Google has a massive winner on its hands as it will get the backing from estate agents currently paying for rival sites," Mead is quoted as saying.

Concern has been expressed as to how such a portal would affect other UK-based real estate web sites, but in Australia, such sites are still getting listings. However, some also think Google getting more heavily involved in real estate listings could have a further effect on newspapers, which are obviously already struggling.

Last month Google added some new real estate features to Google maps. Now you can just search for "real estate" or other real estate-related geographical queries and get listings. Listings now have their own "place pages."

Related Articles:

>  Google Adds Real Estate to Australian Maps

> Google Maps Takes Another Crack At Real Estate

> Will Google Eliminate the Need for Small Business Websites?

News of this is spreading (like…I will omit the inappropriate pun here) on Twitter at a rapid pace:

Hopefully nobody is/will be hurt in this situation.

Update: A BBQ Out of hand? 

Update 2: Daily Telegraph reports that the fire is out  and it started from a BBQ catching a tree on fire. Apparently nobody was hurt.

These statistics come courtesy of Hitwise’s Heather Hopkins, who analyzed Amazon UK’s traffic in a recent blog post.  In a broad sense, it may be useful to know that “Amazon.co.uk is the second most visited retail website after eBay UK based on UK internet visits and ranks #15 overall, just behind BBC.co.uk and ahead of YouTube,” according to Hopkins.

It seems that books have bested grainy videos, then, but Amazon’s traffic may be due to its other wares, as well.  “We’re often asked how much of Amazon’s traffic is books related and how much is electronics or other,” notes Hopkins.  “We can’t say for sure.  Because of the complexity of the site’s structure, it is near impossible to separate books from the rest.”

Yet the top term that sent visits to Amazon UK during the first part of July was “books,” and the second, “giles wareing,” is the main character of a novel.  As you might have expected, “harry potter” was also on the list (though I was surprised to see the boy wizard all the way down in seventh position, especially given an earlier report concerning Emma Watson’s popularity).

One strange thing about Hopkins’s report: somehow this may all be related to the entity formerly known as British Telecom – that’s where about 2.5 percent of people go after visiting Amazon UK.

“[W]e profiled Google Image Search, the top website visited after Google in the UK,” announces Heather Hopkins, Hitwise UK’s vice president of research.  “More than three-quarters of UK visits to Google UK Image Search come from the Google search engine.  The website ranked #18 among All Categories of websites and it has ranked among the top 20 websites each week in the past year based on UK visits.”

Hopkins’s findings make sense – the average user isn’t likely to use different search engines for specialized purposes.  Heck, even the true technophile should find it easier to stick with just one engine (assuming the engine works well).  But Google’s dominance is always an impressive thing to behold.

“As you would expect, Google Image Search dominates the Graphics and Clip Art category, ranking #1 every week for the past two years,” the Hitwise VP continues.  “Google UK Image Search received 60.48% of UK visits to the Graphics and Clip Art category.  Combined with the dot com site, Google Images captured 69.09% of category visits.”

And there are no indicators that the trend will turn against the search engine giant; people seem content with its Image Search.  “Consumers spent an average of just over 10 minutes on the website last week, indicating that they are spending time viewing multiple images,” reports Hopkins.  Multiple images getting viewed, multiple sites performing well – it’s smooth sailing for Google in the UK.

WebSideStory collected searcher data for the month of February 2006 and found that Google referred an average of 74.67 percent of all U.K. visitors to other sites on the Web.

Yahoo! commanded just 9.3 percent as Google’s nearest competitor. Google search percentage in the U.K. exceeds both the U.S. average (55.39 percent), and the global average (62.4 percent).

“Even more so in the U.K. than in the U.S., when people think of search, they think of Google,” said Rand Schulman, Chief Marketing Officer for WebSideStory.

“This has large implications for U.K. marketers, whose search engine marketing and optimization strategies should be Google-centric.”

The U.K. top five search engines are the same as the U.S. with a bit of a smaller share of the market. After Yahoo!, MSN referred 5.46 percent, AOL 4.21 percent, and Ask Jeeves 2.28 percent.

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