Nestoria UK Blog

Nestoriaks!

Today we once again take a bit of time to review recent changes we’ve made to the core algorithms that make Nestoria the simplest way to find houses and flats in the UK. As long time readers will recall from our past updates we collectively term these algorithms “Nestoria Rank”.

First and foremost, we recently launched a big improvement to the technology we use to detect “duplicate” properties – when we get the same house from multiple sources. In the same way that we work hard to eliminate spam and expired listings, it is critical to correctly detect duplicates. Property searchers aren’t interested in seeing the same home multiple times. Unfortunately, it can be surprisingly hard for a computer to detect that different property descriptions from different sources are actually the same house. As an example, here’s a screenshot of a time in the past where we just weren’t getting it right:

While the prices are the same, the listings have different descriptions, different photos, come from different estate agents, and most critically, are geocoded slightly differently. Nestoria users will be pleased to know we’ve been able to solve all these issues, and are now much better at detecting duplicates.

Additionally, in the last few months we added the ability for property searchers to immediately find similar homes to ones you like. And we’ve done a lot of work on sorting and categorising properties so you find only highly relevant results.

Of course along with these subtle algorithmic changes we remain committed to improvement on all other aspects of what makes a great search engine:

• In terms of usability we’ve had very positive feedback on our sliders. More importantly we’ve seen from our internal metrics that the average user is now finding relevant homes in fewer pages. We of course continue to test new usability improvements all the time.
• We’ve increased the comprehensiveness of our database of property by adding new developments.
• We’ve greatly improved our API so that anyone can play with our database of over 650,000 listings.

So, a few improvements. And of course we did all for both the UK and Spanish property search. Nevertheless, we still have a long way to go though, and you’ll be happy to know we’ve only scratched the surface of the ideas we have. We’ve got a few tricks up our sleeve for the coming weeks.

While our personal metric of success is how many people we help find a home as quickly and simply as possible, it was a great validation of our work when Nestoria was recently chosen by Google to serve as the Google Code case study for successful use of the Google maps API.

As always we look forward to your feedback – please let us know how you think we’re doing.