Nestoria Blog

Hello Nestoria fans

As promised, here’s a long overdue update on some of the work we’ve done over the last few months to improve the property search experience on Nestoria.

Strictly speaking, Nestoria Rank is the name we give to our relevancy algorithm, but there are many aspect of creating a compelling search experience, and we’ve been fiddling with several of them:

• Comprehensiveness: our database now has over 450,000 high quality listings of properties to buy and rent all across the UK. What do we mean by high quality? Well, we send a lot of time trying to weed out listings that are already sold or “sold subject to contract” or listings that are outright spam. In total we actually have almost 600,000 listings, so you can see we’re very serious about weeding out dubious listings.

  Of course we’re always on the search for more listings. If you have access to property listings and want to get them in front of a highly relevant audience, we’d love to hear from you

• Usability: We’ve spent some time tweaking our algorithms, and the site is now 30-40% faster on average. How do we know? Well, we plant little javascript beacons on some pages that allow us to measure how long it took for our pages to render.

  We haven’t played much with our interface the past few weeks, but we now have a large enough user base to begin testing minor tweaks on a small subset of users. So don’t be surprised if you start seeing some little changes (hopefully improvements) in the coming weeks and months.

• Analysis systems: Our pure property search engine approach to the market is meeting a need for more and more internet users. According to comscore our number of unique UK users has grown by over 50% the last three months.

  Now, you might read that and say “Ed, what do I care how many people use Nestoria, I just want to find property fast.” and you’re right.

  Nevertheless, the more people we have using Nestoria the more chances we have to learn. So we’ve invested effort in building analysis tools to help us see when we’re not quite doing as well as we could be. This is also why we spend time on our API and our co-branded service. With the tools we have in place, the more users we have, the more we learn, the better we can make the property search experience.

• and last, but not least, our dear friend Relevancy: we’ve continued to tweak the old Nestoria algorithm over the last few months. We now have over 10 different elements in the equation we use to determine which flats and houses are shown first. It’s still early days (we have many more ideas), but we’re already seeing via metrics like repeat usage and percentage of users clicking on first results that our emphasis on relevancy is being well received.

So, does all this mean Nestoria is now perfect? No, of course not, we still have a long way to go, we only launched to cover all of the UK five months ago.

But we wanted to let you know what we’ve been up to, and most of all let you know that the ground work has now been laid for some deeper and continual improvements.

But that’s just what we think, let us know how you think we’re doing.