Nestoria UK Blog

Fellow Nestorwegians,

The time between Christmas and the New Year is a natural chance to look back on the last year and what we’ve accomplished. The next few days we’ll do a few more reflective posts summarising some of the accomplishment of the past year.

First up we thought we’d revisit Nestoria Rank, the algorithm we use to try to present relevant results to property searchers. Over the last few months we’ve continually experimented with changes designed to get people to the right house or flat more quickly.

Some of these changes have been very visible, others are more related to the algorithm itself. Let’s go through some of the more visible improvements first:

We now allow you to search by property characteristics.

This means searches like: an unfurnished two bed flat to rent near Little Venice with a balcony are now easily possible (right now we have 111 of them in the database)

Likewise, we’ve added the ability to filter your search only for “new builds”

We know newness to the market, or ‘freshness’ as we call it is a critical part of how people search for their next home so we now show you how long a property has been on the market and allow you to sort properties by age.

We’ve also integrated more and more local content to provide context to your property search. Most recently we’ve updated the London tube lines to add the London Overground, but we also added sports facilities and parking spaces in the last few months.

But those are just some of the new features you as a user can see. Rest assured we’ve been equally hard at work optimising the backend systems that you don’t see. Over the last few months we’ve been experimenting with systems that learn from individual user behaviour and adapt in real time. This is still in test mode, but we’re almost there. So don’t be surprised if the guy sitting next to you in the office starts getting Nestoria different search results than you.

Our thanks go out to everyone for the feedback we get on new features, but especially we’d like to thank those folks who volunteered to be betatesters.

So, what does 2008 hold? Well in the immediate future you can expect better integration of the metadata we recently made available via our API, and we’re always playing with data visualisation.

BTW – If you don’t like the way we’re displaying search results you have two choices: please let us know what we could do better and we’ll try to run a test with your suggested modification, or you can try your hand at our API and build your own interface. In the last month there have been many interesting uses of the API.