Loyal readers, as promised, I’d like to explain a bit more about our default property search algorithm: Nestoria Rank.
We know that the providing a quality search experience depends on several elements: relevancy, freshness, comprehensiveness, data quality, and usability.
Relevancy is a very tricky thing – even consistently measuring it is tough. But it’s one of the things we spend most of our time working on.
When we first launched Nestoria in June our search was fairly basic. Since then we’ve tested several different algorithms that depend on many different parameters. Obvious elements of the equation are things like distance from the center point of a region and quality of the listing (does it have a photo, how comprehensive the data is, etc), but there are many others. We’ve also incorporated several ideas and comments from our users (many thanks).
We measure things quite closely, and the tests have been very revealing. Over the weeks we tweaked the parameters, and we now feel proud enough to actually give our algorithm a name. And thus Nestoria Rank was born.
Like any newborn, Nestoria Rank still has a lot of growth potential. We think right now we’re at about version 0.1 . Improving relevancy is an ongoing process, and we have a long list of ideas we’ll be testing to improve the property search experience. We’ll keep refining in the coming weeks and months, please keep the feedback coming!
A picture of the team discussing the next step in Nestoria Rank development:
