Author Archive for Ruben

Impact of Daylight Saving Time on Nestoria

Published by Ruben on October 27, 2009 in search. Comments

Most of us adjusted backward our clocks one hour on Sunday. We had to do so to comply with the official time change, known as Daylight Saving Time. The original purpose of DST was to preserve the precious coal during WWI by adapting incandescent lighting usage to the duration of the day.

Nowadays DST is popularly regarded as a disrupting legacy practice of little benefit. Every six months we all have to adjust our behaviour, which of course is reflected in seasonal peaks of interest in DST:

We had the suspicion that many of the UK residents spent that additional time to sleep one hour more on a particularly lazy Sunday morning.

Back at the office, we were curious enough to check the impact of the time change on our metrics. We are always trying to improve how Nestoria users make the most of the property search engine. We measure that by looking at, among many other parameters, the number of visitors, their time on site and what they exactly do, particularly clicking on navigational features, property listings, pictures of houses, etc.

Impact of DST on the last Sunday in October 2009 on Nestoria.co.uk

We compared the activity on the Sunday 25th October, when clocks were adjusted one hour backward, with the previous Sunday, October 18th with the standard duration of 24 hours. The duration of the day was adjusted to identical periods of 24 hours and the number of visits normalized for the two days of comparison.

The distribution of the visitors in percentage of the total daily hardly varies beyond 7% on the total daily average, measured as the differences in the sum of percentages of visits of the visitors. Sundays are usually the days of the week with the longest average time on site, followed by Saturdays.

Number of Visits to Nestoria.co.uk on two consecutive Sundays

We found that Daylight Saving does show a significant shift in the hourly pattern of usage of the web site: up to 10% of users shifted the beginning and end of their visits during the beginning and the end of the day. Whilst the total variation is small in numbers, the shift of activity shows the expected behaviour of visits that start earlier in the day and start to decline also earlier.

No evidence that one additional hour of duration of the day generated proportionally more visits

The additional hour of the last Sunday in October increased by 4% (from 24 hours to 25 hours) the real duration of that day. The number of visits increased by 4%. It is unclear whether this variation in total number of visitors is due to weekly seasonality and/or increased duration of the day. It seems that additional availability of time is not spent in more activity online. That extra hour that day could dedicated to rest or leisure.

You may find a complete description of the analysis at Archive.org

Freedom of speech – full text searches in property databases by Lokku Labs

Published by Ruben on August 3, 2009 in search. Comments

Search engines such as Google or Bing are like Swiss army knives: not only they scout for new web pages and documents on Internet, they fetch them, index them and offer users a very efficient access to their information thanks to their full-text search capabilities. Full (or free) text search is a technique for locating words and strings of text in documents or databases. In technical jargon, the documents found matching a given query are called “hits”.

In contrast to the generalist engines, the great majority of property web sites pre-determine the user experience with field-restricted search of specific real estate terms. The search experience is organized by fields including location, prices and other such as:

* Type of property: house or flat
* Basic features: rooms, number of bathrooms
* Attributes like garden, parking, garage, swimming pool, etc.

We got to work at Lokku Labs to develop a full text search capabilities on our extensive database of property listings. We tested our prototypes of Gartoo with queries like

* easy access to Heathrow and Gatwick
* Canary Wharf flats to let with security

The results of the pilot project are very encouraging. We manage to get hits for many interesting queries involving properties and location names. The challenge is to “understand what the query really means” and to find and rank each property listing by its relevance to the query. For example, “Houses to rent in Sale” is one of those cases that defy the usual understanding of natural language. Our challenge will not end with the ranking of results; we will analyze searches that do not produce satisfactory results to try to improve our algorithms accordingly.

Besides learning a new search technology, we will experiment with an extremely simple design. We plan to run a live test of our work very soon indeed, please keep an eye on Lokku Labs.

Nestoria at the Search Engine Strategies conference in London 2009

Published by Ruben on February 20, 2009 in events. Comments

Nestoria attended the conference of Search Engine Strategies in London this week. Many experts in Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing and Analytics, mostly from the US and the UK, had a number of discussions, and generally had fun for a few days.

We were lucky to attend a few brilliant presentations and panels. It is hard to pick the most interesting session but our vote probably goes to the ‘SEO – Where to Next?’. Chris Sherman (Search Engine Land), Brett Tabke (WebmasterWorld), Jill Whalen (High Rankings), Rand Fishkin (SEOMoz) and Kevin Ryan (Motivity Marketing) all were there moderated by Mike Grehan (Acronym Media) where there. By the way, I did not know that the term ‘black hat’ was coined by Mike a while ago. The pragmatism of Chris, Brett and Jill was a contrast to the funny cynical comments by Kevin, and the optimism by Rand.

We did our homework: did we learn to optimise video?

There were also a number of sessions, arguably too many, about optimising video and images. Admittedly, video is growing very strongly in use; Comscore just reported that over 84% of U.K. internet users viewed a video online in December 2008.

This video is our summary of the SES conference. Did we do a good job applying some of the learning about Digital Content Search Engine Optimization?

The video ends with a cheeky promotion of our property search engine by commuting times and our comparison site of house price trends by location, Nestoholic. I apologize beforehand for my frequent “erm’s” and numerous tics. You may also find a transcription of the nestoria video.

Nestoholic – House prices comparison may be addictive

Published by Ruben on December 19, 2008 in API and what's hot. Comments

The current crisis of the housing market is exacerbating a very British obsession with house prices. Here at Nestoria we decided to approach this topic with a lighter spirit. In order to find which areas are becoming good value, we created Nestoholic.com.

Nestoholic is a web site that compares average asking prices of houses between different locations in London and the UK. Renthusiast announced the official launch of Nestoholic earlier this week.

If you are not to be carried away by the doom and gloom of this end of the year, you might be interested in finding by yourself that average asking house price is a very resilient metric. There seems to be a time lag between the mortgage approvals and the expectations of asking house prices. Sellers are, on average, seemingly not desperate and they rather wait for the right buyer to come their way. Probably private buy-to-let investors and many passive sellers with unoccupied homes are dampening the big falls of actively-selling properties as reported by estate agents.

You might as well find locations within commuting distance from London whose trends are beginning to diverge, like comparison of prices of Harpenden and Brighton. Admittedly, the very rich will not be affected anyway, we just need to check the prices in Chelsea, for instance.

Nestoholic is one of the ideas that we are testing as part of Lokku Labs. The primary intent of these experiments consists in showing some possible uses of the Nestoria API and motivate developers and webmasters to squeeze all the value that their imagination sees fit from our database.

To learn more about how Nestoria obtain its average asking prices please read Nestoria’s help page about house price data. We are looking forward to hearing from anyone ready to spend some time to create a new approach to our data, so please do not hesitate to contact us.

Post Offices information on Nestoria

Published by Ruben on August 8, 2008 in search. Comments

We love the Post Offices. Our attachment to them is rooted in the deep belief that through the last decades, whatever happens, come good or bad, the local branch will always be there.

Every local post office is simultaneously, a mail office, a bank branch, a stationery shop and many other things. Post offices are hubs of activity that offer the rare opportunity to be nice to your elders at the queue or test your resilience by ignoring the teenager shouting ‘Oh my God and she went like…’ on her mobile phone inches away from your ear.

The Royal Mail network was 18,000-strong in 1999, but now stands at about 14,000. For years already, the planned closures of thousands of post offices set off outcry across the country. We Londoners tend to believe that only remote rural areas are affected, so it comes as a surprise to find out that even our city will see many offices go.

Interestingly, the online interest for the Post Offices and Royal Mail keeps growing at least since 2004:


Google insights for post office searchs

Google insights for post office searchs


Post Offices geolocated to maps of property search

Nestoria.co.uk shows now the addresses of local post offices per location in the UK, with their pins located on maps along with the houses for sale or rent, for instance at the page of Property for Sale in Maidenhead:

Property for sale in Maidenhead

As for precise location and addresses of the outlets, they are available at the local tab ‘Post Offices’ below the map, as seen on this search for Property for sale in Reading:

Property for sale in Reading

We hope this helps Nestoria users to visualize the precise location of essential services near their ideal homes. Thanks to MTM and Yoav of the Nestoria team for their work in mashing this up in record time!

Happy Birthday Nestoria Spain!

Published by Ruben on May 15, 2008 in about us. Comments

Fellow Nestoriacs!
Today we celebrate: We launched Nestoria in Spain one year ago!

Nestoria Spain homepage screenshot

Hard to believe it has been a full year since we went online with our Iberian offering.

We still have a long way to go, but the our little property search engine has been well received by users, and after 12 months we’re closing in on 200,000 users a month (source: comScore March 2008).

Equally important we’ve built up a great list of partners. We are now aggregating listings from twelve of the top property portals in Spain, and we just added well over 50,000 listings from a new partner yesterday. We also also keeping our focus on usability and metrics all along the way. In addition to all the experience and innovations that we introduced in the UK, specifically for Spain we launched property search by neighbourhoods, like Barris Maritims of Tarragona and by street name, eg. Camino de la Mar en Benidorm. We’ve learned a lot along the way, and we still have much to learn. Please let us know if you have any comments or ideas of what we could do better.

For those Nestoria fans interested in more details I recommend you subscribe to our Spanish blog. You find a much more detailed birthday celebration post there.

Future international expansion plans
We are now confident that our model can replicate to other countries. We are bracing ourselves for further expansion plans. In a few weeks time, we plan to launch Nestoria Deutschland and Nestoria Italia. More on that soon!

Hasta pronto, mi amigos!

The weird and wonderful world of search

Published by Ruben on May 4, 2007 in search. Comments

Today we present a bit of Friday fun.

Like many websites, we closely monitor which terms and queries people are using in general web search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN to reach Nestoria. Typically these queries are quite standard – for example “homes for sale near Stoke on Trent”. But sometimes we do see some odd and interesting surprises. We thought we’d share a few with you today:

  • “why would people move to falconwood?” We say, why not? Falconwood is a nice place to live near Eltham, South East London. We at Nestoria are particularly fond of the Eltham Palace, an amazing residence of Stephen and Virginia Courtauld from the 1930’s. Are you in the market for something nearby? You may start your search by considering Eltham houses to buy.

  • “how to find a decent property to rent in london” This is a tough question for a search engine to answer. It’s very hard to know what is meant by ‘decent’. Perhaps a three bedroom flat in a not outrageously expensive area of London like Fulham, or a house in one of the commuter paradises like Harpenden?

  • “houses for sale 5,000″If ever there was a challenge to offer relevant results to our users, this is one. Can “any” property search engine in the UK find houses for sale for less than five thousand sterling? We try our best, but there are limits. We do however have hundreds of thousands of houses for sale across the UK.

In general we find that our users set the bar very high indeed. A recent Nestoria user searching for “houses for sale in chelsea” ended up filtering down to properties in Chelsea for not more than 125,000. And we found one for him (or her), only it was a garage. Our technology may seem like magic, but not even we can accomplish the impossible task of finding a cheap home in Chelsea.

Have a good weekend.