Fellow Nestoriticians!
Today we wanted to give you a bit more insight into some of the challenges we face in building Nestoria. In attempting to provide our users with the easiest way to search for property in the UK we consider four major factors: comprehensiveness, usability, relevancy, and freshness. Comprehensiveness is seemingly the simplest to measure of these parameters. Essentially it is asking - “how many properties are there in the database?” As with many things though that at first glance seem simple, the actual answer is not so easy. The question is whether you measure the gross number of properties or the net. Of all the raw properties that come in, we unfortunately find some that are spam and of course we don’t want to show those to our users. Next, we also attempt to remove non-residential properties. Then there is the significant number of sold or ’sold subject to contract’ homes that we need to strip out. Detecting all of these types of ‘bad’ listings is conceptually straight forward (which isn’t to say we’re perfect - don’t hesitate to let us know when one has slipped through our nets).The final challenge we face is a bit more difficult. Because we have listings from many sources we often have to grapple with duplicates - when we have the same property from multiple sources. This is often not trivial because the same house can have a different description or slightly different address details. Often the data from different sources disagrees slightly; source A may tell us the property is a freehold, while source B thinks it’s a leasehold. With limited and/or conflicting information the decision about what is and what isn’t a duplicate isn’t always clear. And of course the universe of properties we have to consider is continually changing - homes are continually coming on and off the market.
One possible solution you might propose is to analyze the photos of the property. This occasionally works, but even if they are the same original photos they may have slightly different size, cropping, sharpness, red-eye-reduction (just kidding), or image quality. All which makes the images look the same for the human eye, but different for a computer. Here are some examples we found recently of duplicates with slightly different photos of the same house:
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“In attempting to provide our users with the easiest way to search for property in the UK we consider four major factors: comprehensiveness, usability, relevancy, and freshness.”
Unfortunately for my property searches you miss by a mile on all counts, because you never return any results. I’m not looking for a property in a particular town, but the key for me is the property features. So I try searching for any of the following - garden, garage, listed, barn, swimming pool. Nothing!
Before trying to restrict the properties that are shown which you talk about here, any chance that you could make a simple keyword search for properties work - in this modern world, as work becomes more flexible, property searching is less about where a property is, but more about what features the property provides.
Hi Mark,
Sorry to hear that your property search on Nestoria was unsuccessful.
Can you contact us via our feedback form (linked in the article) so we can learn more about your ideas on keyword search? We’d also like to know in which area of the UK you searched and how you used the map or other navigation to select a broader area (if the location wasn’t a top priority).
How did you search for ’swimming pool’? Via the search box?
Making the website easy and listing 100 keyword options is a challenge, we chose not to show all (until now, no reason not to change it!) Searches for e.g. ‘gym’, ’sauna’, ‘cottage’ and ’swimming pool’ are currently only possible via our API.
thx
marc tobias
Hi Mark,
thanks for taking the time to comment, and sorry you’re not finding what you want.
You ask a good question about adding a comprehensive keyword search. We study our logs closely, every day examining the queries that come in and especially what percentage of searches we’re unable to find results for.
The reality is that almost no one searches the way you’re describing. As a result, given our limited resources, it hasn’t been a priority for us. If we see that this is the way people want to search we’ll of course invest the time to further develop keyword searching.
Sadly though, that doesn’t help you find what you’re looking for, which is no doubt frustrating. One frustration we grapple with is that we’re not going to please all the people all the time. That’s exactly why we do offer our API to allow others to experiment with different interfaces.
Thanks again for the feedback, please keep it coming.
best,
Ed