[bane]

"In part due to low usage, the proliferation of excellent property-search tools on real estate websites, and the infrastructure challenge posed by the impending retirement of the Google Base API (used by listing providers to submit listings),"

Whatever happened to wanting to make all the world's data searchable?

Reasons 2 and 3 are pure cop outs.

Google has a real problem in that they seem to not be able to produce a best-in-breed class of software for highly competitive areas. If somebody came out with better search tomorrow would they just drop it?