Fellow Nestorese,
as is our habit we often like to give you a peek behind the curtain of a vertical search engine and show you some of the challenges we face. Today I thought I’d explain the difficulty of ambiguity.
We humans have fallen into the lazy habit of using the same word to mean many things, including place names. A shockingly high number of places in the UK share the same name. For locals this is typically no problem, because it’s clear which place is being referred to, but it can make the lives of a property search engine developer struggling night and day to help you find homes to buy and rent as easily as possible very difficult. For example, if you just search for a
properties for sale in Rushton how do we know which of the three Rushtons in the UK you mean?
But of course there are some placenames, that, though they exist in multiple locations around the country, have a clear winner. For example,
properties for sale in Waterloo. In a flurry of post Napoleonic war celebration, many areas were named after the historic battle ground. There are five Waterloos around the UK, but when most people say they want to
rent a flat near Waterloo, they mean near the south London train station. In those cases we take you, our dear flat searching friend, directly to what we believe is the dominant result, but also give you the option to change your search to the more obscure locations:
Differentiating between the locations which are truly ‘ambiguous’ and those like Waterloo where there is a clear winner is the challenge. These are the subtle tweaks that lead to a product that ‘just works’. Please
let us know if you’ve found any locations you think we’re not quite getting right.
One final note, this problem is in no way isolated to the English language. In fact the UK isn’t bad – I’ll leave it to our
spanish blog to rant about how many
San Sebastians there are in Spain.
