Nestorinians,
We’re always hard at work on making it as quick and easy as possible to find a home to buy or let. Usability is a tricky concept. What one person likes, another dislikes. There is one thing everyone seems to agree on though: they want the internet, and especially search engines, to be as fast as possible.
As such we’re continually on the lookout for ways to speed up Nestoria. We were pleased to read about the recent
release of YSlow, a tool from Yahoo! for measuring performance flaws. The tool is great in it’s simplicity, and also pleasing in that there’s
a wealth of documentation that actually explains the logic behind the recommendations.
Unfortunately, YSlow won’t help us make Nestoria much faster because we’re already hitting a score of 94 out of 100 on our homepage.
The areas we could improve would be to use a CDN or ‘content delivery network’ like
Akamai, but sadly that’s not really an option (or even needed) for a lean and mean start up like Nestoria.
Nevertheless, rest assured, dear Nestoria user, that we’re always doing our best to make the site as fast as possible. We’ve got a few more tricks planned for the coming weeks, which should hopefully ensure your search for your next home will be served up as quickly as possible.
BTW, as one of several Yahoo! alumni in the Nestoria team, it’s very cool to see yet another bit of coolness (see our coverage of
Y! Pipes and the
Nestoria Yahoo! Hack Day) from the kids in Sunnyvale. Keep it up.
As those of you who read this blog regularly know, here at Nestoria we work hard on the issue of relevance. Put simply, do you get what you searched for? In the context of property search we believe this consists of two parts: did we identify the location you meant, and did we then show you relevant results for that query. To help us with the first part we rely on all sorts of tools, from commercial geodata sets like Tele Atlas, to the low-tech physical atlas we have in the office. But as a ‘lean and mean’ (well actually we think of ourselves as ‘lean and friendly’) start-up we’re always on the look out for clever ways to solve problems without stretching our budget.
One such tool that we couldn’t work without is
GeoNames an open source database of geographic information set up by Marc Wick. Happily Marc has agreed to be this month’s Nestoria interviewee.
Marc Wick has held various positions as software engineer and database expert in the financial and technical industry for Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), Telekurs and Siemens Transportation Systems. He is now working as self-employed software engineer and consultant in Switzerland, and has a degree in Computer Science from the
Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
Marc, thanks for taking the time to talk with us.
1. Explain the idea behind geonames.org
GeoNames is a global gazetteer, aggregating local data sets and combining information from various sources like national mapping agencies, census data, postal codes, digital elevation models and many more. A tremendous amount of data is freely available but not easily accessible as the data is often hidden on myriads of national websites. We expect even more official data to become freely available as politicians and authorities begin to understand how important unencumbered access to geodata is for the economy of their country. This process will take some time as it often requires a change of the national mapping agencies’ business models.
The idea of the GeoNames project is to aggregate this national and local data and combine it into one global project. The stance of GeoNames is a pragmatic one, the main goal is to provide useful data and web services.
2. What are some of the challenges unique to managing geographic data?
The big challenge is having to deal with countless sources. Official geodata is often managed by local authorities on a subnational or regional level. This adds up to an incredible number of potential sources and all use different data formats, have other data quality, use their own classification scheme and are published in local languages and scripts. It is a challenging task to harmonize and consolidate all this information.
3. What are your thoughts on the developments in the online geography sector (maps, etc) in the last 18 months?
Online geography has become a commodity feature, mainly in the wake of Google Maps. Some web developers even start considering to remove maps from their site since online maps have become so common place and ‘uncool’. We also see a separation between traditional GIS and online maps. It no longer requires a GIS specialist to integrate maps in an application. Maps have become part of every web developer’s tool set. Commoditization of GPS enabled devices like photo cameras will strengthen this trend in the future.
4. What are the challenges you think a vertical search engine for property like Nestoria faces?
I could imagine that the main technical challenge is to get and parse the data. For the users it is crucial that the data on the site is correct, is frequently updated and the number of attributes parsed and annotated with meaning is also essential. Even more important than the technical challenges is to find and implement the right strategy for the niche between general purpose horizontal search engines like Google and real estate agents, classifieds and real estate platforms on the other hand. Driving traffic to the site and keeping users on the site is certainly another vital key issue.
Thanks Marc, you’re very correct. Managing massive data feeds from many different sources, in different formats, and categorized and indexed in different ways is not a trivial challenge. This is exactly the value a vertical search engine like Nestoria adds to the property industry. For those interested in following GeoNames’ progress, I recommend subscribing to the
GeoNames blog.
past Nestoria interviews:
Nick Black,
Fleming Madsen,
Mike Price.
Nestocheks!
A quick note to celebrate an important milestone here at Nestoria. It seems so many people are searching for Nestoria that we’ve made it into Google’s default search suggestion index! Try it out over at
Google Suggest or see this screenshot.
Autosuggeston is one of the original
AJAX showcases that defined the advent of the ‘web2.0′ experience, and we’ve had it here at Nestoria since we launched:
Of course, searching from our homepage isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. If instead you like searching directly from your browser, as many Firefox users do, I can also recommend the
Nestoria Firefox search plugin:
it’s just one of the many tools we offer to
make it simple for people to search for homes. As always, please
let us know how you think we’re doing.
Dearest Nestophiles,
As you no doubt remember, last October we launched the
first ever commercial use of OpenStreetMap maps by using OSM maps for
properties in the Isle of Wight I’m very pleased to report that OSM has continued to develop since then. The recent
State of the Map conference was a great chance for the community to meet, reflect on the progress made, trade tips, and plot the way forward, and we’re proud to have been able to
sponsor the event.
One point that came up during the conference was that the OSM imagery we use on Nestoria, although only 10 months old, is already out of date. The change in detail in the maps is indicative of the improvement of quality we’ve seen from OSM over the last year. Have a look at these maps of
Cowesold imagery:
new imagery:
Things to note:
- better labeling
- better colouring
- green space designation
- one way streets
- walking paths
zoom in and it gets better, as you can see in this Nestoria DropIn map
We’re not the only ones to recognize OpenStreetMap’s continued improvement. Automotive Navigation Data (AND), a leading provider of location, routing, mapping and address management are
donated their entire dataset for a country to OSM
More and more OpenStreetMap is becoming a viable alternative to commercial mapping products. Congrats to all the volunteers behind OpenStreetMap. Makes one wonder if now is really a good time to
spend 2 billion Euro on a mapping service.
Dearest Nestokies!
As you will recall, a few weeks ago we launched the
Facebook application to search for flats and houses in both the UK and for the
Spanish market (we think we are the first non-English language applet)!
Developers have rapidly been embracing the Facebook Platform. There’s been some amazing innovation. But, as is to be expected with any new system, there are lots of questions. All over the world users of the FB platform are meeting up to exchange tips and tricks, and London, where the Nestoria team is based, is no different.
Next Tuesday (24th of July)
London Facebook Developers will be meeting at our favourite pub,
the John Snow, in
Soho at 18:00.
We’re pleased to announce Nestoria will be sponsoring the event. I’m happy to buy any and everyone their first beer on one condition – you have to give us some feedback on how we can improve our application. You can recognize me by
my Facebook profile picture.
If you develop for Facebook and are in London, we hope to see you there. As enthusiastic supporters of the perl community, we’d especially like to trade tips with anyone using perl to build for FB (special thanks to the authors of
WWW::Facebook::API
On a final note, we very much appreciate all the positive feedback on our applets:
Inside Facebook,
Future of Real Estate Marketing,
Tecnología Inmobiliaria,
Facereviews. We’ll of course continue working to improve the applets.
Here at Nestoria, we like to provide our users with quality information, in order to enable them to search for their dream house quickly and efficiently.
This means providing snippets of key information, and of course, lovely thumbnail (small) images of the properties in question. However, some sites provide us with images that sadly turn out to be far from lovely, and have little relevance for someone searching for a home to buy or rent.
Take for example these gems:
But we don’t mean to single these few out, there are actually quite a few bad apples. Here’s a little quilt of ‘image not available’ images. And these are just a tiny, tiny percentage of the ‘bad images’ we come across.
We’ve developed algorithms to weed out these less useful images, and promote those listings that do have relevant photographs.
This is just one way in which we aim to make the life of the property searcher easier. If you ever come across an unsavory image in our listings, please
get in touch and we’ll make sure it doesn’t show up again.
How do we detect these sub-par images? One word: magic.
Enjoy your picture-filled property searching.
For those that haven’t seen it, this week’s edition of The Economist has an article about vertical search. Though the article focuses mainly on the health care vertical in the US, it does a good job of summing up the advantages (and challenges) of vertical search for the layman. One quote in particular stands out:
In short, relevance is king, says Monique Levy of Jupiter which suggests that a vertical search-engine that successfully pairs a broad target market with a complicated topic can do well
We couldn’t agree more, which is exactly why we spend so much time working on relevancy. We’ve developed our own algorithm, called Nestoria Rank, which we use to show the best results for a user’s search for a home to buy or rent. We
occasionally document our work on Nestoria Rank here on the blog. We’ll post another update about some of the new tweaks we’re currently working on in a few weeks.
It’s very encouraging to see someone else recognizing the importance of relevancy.
On a related note, long time Nestoria Blog readers may recall our first ever post in June of last year: “
Vertical Search, What’s That?“
Cyfarchion Nestoria Users!
Recently we came across this blog post from Rhys Wynne extolling the virtues of Nestoria in Welsh! Rhys documents his search for a house for sale in Prion in Wales (and makes nice use of our DropIn map tool). For those not fluent in Welsh, Rhys also posts in English.
This got us thinking about whether we should develop a Welsh interface to Nestoria. We do pride ourselves on our diverse outlook (BTW
Nestoria in España is going great, more on that in it’s own post soon), but on the other hand we are also a very small team juggling many projects.
We thought we’d put the question to you, our users.
What do you think? Is this a project worth doing? Or perhaps there’s someone out there who would like to use
the Nestoria API to create their own Welsh interface to our database?
One final note – we’d of course also love to hear from
Cornish,
Scottish Gaelic, and
Manx speaking Nestoria users as well.
Dear Nestolovaks,
As regular readers of this blog know we’re constantly on the search for relevant information to help you make an informed decision about the home you’re thinking of buying, renting or sharing. This of course means filtering and cleansing the actual property listings themselves, but it also means that we collect relevant information about the local area. This is why we show local content like schools, shops, census data, parliamentary representation, public transportation and so forth.
Today we’re pleased to announce an addition to that list of local data. We’ve integrated information about local parking spaces from innovative new UK website
ParkatmyHouse onto all relevant Nestoria property search results pages.
Here’s an example. Imagine you’re searching for a
flat to rent in Notting Hill but you also need a place to park your car. No worries, my carbon-burning, congestion charge paying friend, just click on the “Parking” tab below the map, and nearby parking opportunities are displayed as pins on the map:
The team over at ParkatmyHouse show both traditional parking services along with ordinary people who have a parking space they’re looking to rent out. It’s a great example of using the internet as a tool to bring people together.
Please
let us know what you think, especially if you have any suggestions for other types of local data you’d like to see.
Nestoria People!
Due to popular demand we’ve just upgraded our property listings API to version 1.10. You are now able to specify a centre point and a radius (in kilometers or miles) within which you want to see listings.
As ever, all details of the API are available on the
technical details page
Enjoy.
