Google has signalled its intent to muscle in on yet another industry not typically associated with internet services: property sales.

The search giant has added a feature to its popular maps service which allows users to look at houses for sale near a given postcode or neighbourhood.

The results are listed according to price, as well as number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and are also displayed on a map so that people can see how close they are to particular streets or public transport.

Google's new role as a matchmaker between house hunters and estate agents could give it access to a slice of the enormous property advertising market.

A limited number of details about the house - along with photographs - are shown on Google's results page, and if a user wants more, he or she can click to be directed to the site of the agent who has listed it.

As with Google's regular search results page, there is the potential for advertisers who are keen to sell houses in the area to pay to have their properties listed alongside Google's results. There is no advertising on the service yet.

The feature is not yet available on the UK mapping site, but a search for 'London' on Google's US-based maps site revealed a handful of houses, including a £1.1 million, two-bedroom flat in Chelsea listed by Knight Frank. A picture of the living room and a close up of its street address on a map are visible within two clicks of the results listing.

Property listings sites such as houseladder.co.uk and hunt4ahome.co.uk are among the other sources of information being scoured by Google's powerful search engine for postcode and address information.

Property is just one of the areas in which Google is seeking to make geography or location an increasingly important part of the results provided by its ubiquitous search tool.

This week, for instance, it added a Wikipedia feature to its maps service, so that any query on a postcode or address now directs the user to a page which not only shows a map of that address, but any Wikipedia entries relevant to places nearby.

A similar feature can throw up any photo that has been taken nearby - and logged by Google - thanks to a technology called 'geo-tagging', which allows information about location to be embedded in digital image files.

News stories compiled by Google News will also start to be tagged in the same way.

"All this data has one common denominator, which is place," said Lion Ron, a product manager for Google Maps. "Even if we don't know much about a place, we can create that knowledge using what we call geo-data."

Google made the announcements at Where 2.0, a conference in San Francisco dedicated to technologies which are making geographical location more relevant to the way we access information on the web.

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