Archive for the 'search' Category

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.

Quantity and Quality

Published by Ed on September 11, 2008 in Nestoria Rank and search. Comments

Fellow Nestortonians,

in your internet wanderings you may have come across long-time property industry expert Bob North’s recent post over at Estate Agency News discussing the comprehensiveness of various property websites (portals and search engines). Bob’s monthly analysis is always interesting, if you’re not a subscriber I recommend you become one. It’s a must read here at Nestoria HQ.

His attention this month focuses on a seemingly simple question: “How many property listings do the various players have?”. We get asked about this all the time. As we’ve always tried to stress here on the blog in our occasional discussions of Nestoria Rank, comprehensiveness is an important metric, but only one of several, the others being usability, freshness, and of course relevancy. Nevertheless, probably because it seems so easy to measure, comprehensiveness seems to be the metric people fixate on. We think it is given far too much importance, despite having some major weaknesses.

First of all, which listings get counted? We believe users are interested only in relevant results. So, should we count listings that are sold or “sold subject to contract”. Given that we focus on helping individuals find a place to live, should we include commercial properties? We think not, and do our best to exclude such listings from our index. As another example, we often see things like parking spaces listed. Of course people need parking spaces for their cars, we just don’t think they belong in a residential property search engine.

Secondly there’s the question of duplication. Often we have the same listing from multiple sources. Is that one listing or multiple? Another good example is when we see very similar units all in the same building or development. Sure different flats may have slightly different dimensions or prices depending on the view and such, but is a user really seeing many different listings? Or are they seeing one option in their choice of where to live?

Next, there’s the issue of sampling bias. When comparing only one or to areas it’s easy to (knowingly or unknowingly) skew the results.

Finally, of course, comparing search engines and portals is a bit like comparing apples and oranges. The two provide very different user experiences with only marginal overlap.

So in conclusion, yes, as Lenin once said “Quantity has a quality of its own”, and of course having a comprehensive offering is critical. But, as with almost every web metric it’s important to understand the meaning behind the number. Comprehensiveness is easy to misinterpret and even then it’s only one ingredient in the property search recipe. Rest assured dear reader we’ll keep our attention on all aspects of creating a compelling service.

Please let us know what you think of our efforts and how we could do better.

Nestoria goes Chrome

Published by Ed on September 8, 2008 in search, technical, tools and what's hot. Comments

Fellow Nestorpeople!

As what marketing folk like to call ‘Lead Users’ all of you will no doubt know that our friends over at Google launched a new web browser, known as Chrome, a few days ago.

As lovers of all things new we of course dove in and took the new browser for a spin.

Nestoria in Chrome

First of all the pros: Chrome is very fast at page rendering (especially pages like Nestoria results pages with lots of javascript), Chrome is very simple (we love simple) Chrome is opensource, and Chrome has some interesting new features. On the con side of the ledger, Chrome isn’t yet available on linux or Mac and folks are finding all sorts of issues with the T&C’s (the whispers of discomfort about Google’s potential for constant monitoring of user behaviour aren’t getting any quieter). All of this is covered in great detail and with heated debate on the various leading tech blogs.

What we found most interesting about Chrome are the features that allow you as a user to make searching Nestoria even easier. There’s a function called “Omnibox” that allows you to assign keywords to searchengines and search directly from the address bar. So, for example I want to find a property near Holborn in London. I assigned the keyword “n” to nestoria, and then away I go.

Nestoria as default search option

Nestoria in Chrome

All in all, Chrome, still has a few issues, but also has some nice new features and will hopefully push the pace of innovation even more, thus benefiting all of us.

On a final note, of course the next of our regular Browser Share posts will break out Chrome users specifically so you can see how the new entrant is doing.

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!

Browser Wars at Nestoria (Take 3)

Published by Ahmed on July 31, 2008 in about us, search, technical and what's hot. Comments

It’s nearly a full 6 months since we brought you our last update on the state of the browser world (Nestoria style) and well over a year since the first installment.

If you haven’t read any post in this series before, I urge you to do so if you’re interested in learning why we place so much emphasis on tracking browser usage so religiously: we do it for you, our loyal (or brand-new) users. We want to make your experience as pleasant and uniform as possible, across all platforms and browsers.

With that in mind, let’s move onto look at the trends for Jan 08 – July 08 and how these contrast with our last review.

General Trends

Overall Share

Internet Explorer’s (IE) share has dropped from 84% to 81%, wheras FIrefox (FF) gained a full 2% points, claiming a 14% share of our users. Safari’s 4% share remains stable, leaving the same 1% for other browsers combined.

It seems that over time, IE is losing it’s share to FF. It also seems apparent that Apple’s release of Safari on Windows hasn’t yet seen any serious uptake/usage, with Safari’s share relatively unchanged.

Firefox Comparison Internet Explorer Comparison Big 3 Browsers Comparison

Version Trends

Previous trends seem to be continuing as far as version uptake is concerned; IE7 usage is increasing every day, with IE6 becoming less favoured but still accounting for a large portion of visits.

We saw a more extreme migration to FF2.x in our last post (with nearly all users quickly switching to the new version), resulting in very low usage of 1.5. The introduction of version 3 this June again saw a fairly swift initial uptake, representing 1/3 of Firefox usage within a few weeks of release.

The long tail of browser/device usage

Whilst traditional platforms and browsers account for the bulk of Nestoria usage, it’s becoming clear that there are a number of capable browsers on a greater and greater range of devices, and that people are beginning to use these devices for the odd spot of property hunting.

Windows accounts for 94.11%, Macintosh for 5.28 and Linux for 0.35%. Things get interesting when you see that the next most popular platform is the iPhone, claiming 0.06% or around 700 visits per month. Next up is the iPod touch with about half the usage of the iPhone. Symbian (all phones) has around the same usage as the touch, whilst the PS3 and Wii bring up the rear with around 200 visits per month.

So, please do let us know how Nestoria’s doing on your chosen system/os/browser, especially if you wish the experience was better.

Common placename misspellings

Published by Ed on May 13, 2008 in search. Comments

Fellow Nestorpeople,

we thought we’d revisit a topic we first discussed some time ago: placename misspellings. Today we thought we’d list some of the trends we see in how some property searchers mangle place names.

First a note on how we deal with place names we can’t recognise. We do our best to ‘auto correct’ common misspellings, of which there are two types: typos and just plain bad spelling. Typos typically happen because someone mistakenly hits the wrong key on his keyboard, while bad spelling is simply because they simply don’t know how to correctly spell a placename. As an example you’ll see that if you search for aproperty in Noting Hill (note: one t, not two) or aproperty in Botting Hill (B is next to N on a keyboard), in both cases you are redirected to properties in Notting Hill. In each case the user just magically lands on the page he ‘meant’ not the page he actually typed. Like all technology our algorithms aren’t perfect, so let us know f you find examples of our auto-correction not working as you would hope.

Now on to some of the common problems we see from UK property searchers:

  • Adding ‘E’. Examples: “Bridgenorth” instead of Bridgnorth or “Edgeware” instead of Edgeware.
  • Dropping ‘E’. Example “Folkstone” instead of Folkestone.
  • Double ‘H’. Examples: “Southhampton” instead of Southampton.
  • mixing ‘LE’ and ‘EL’. Examples: “Wimbeldon” instead of Wimbledon.
  • Phonetic confusion. Examples: “Wry” instead of the correct Rye, “Fullham” instead of Fulham or “Isle of White” rather than Isle of Wight.
  • Bad spacing. Example: “New Castle” instead of Newcastle.
  • I’ll make no attempt to discuss place names in Wales. All rules are out the window.
  • and finally, our old favourite; no one can spell Marylebone.


On the topic of odd placenames, we leave you with one interesting thought: who knew there are two Hollywoods in the UK?

Happy spelling.

Grappling with too many results

Published by Ed on April 30, 2008 in search. Comments

My fellow Nestorticulturalists,

good news, we recently rolled out some minor design tweaks in the hopes of making it a bit easier to sift through our database and find your dream home more quickly.

Specifically, we’re attempting to grapple with the situation when you search across large areas like London or Scotland where we typically have more than 50,000 homes. In these cases it’s difficult to argue that there is a relevant correct search result. While we do show a few houses or flats we focus on helping the user quickly narrow his search to a more manageable number of possibilities. We’ve tried to make this as clear as possible.

Have a look and please let us know what you think. Here’s a screenshot of properties in Wales:

Welsh regions

The problem isn’t just one we face in large geographies – we have it everywhere we have a density of listings – for example as seen here when you search for a home in East London

East London

As always, best of luck with your house hunt. Rest assured our work on usability is far from over, we have a few more design changes being tested right now on a subset of users. More soon.

More photos anyone?

Published by Ed on March 11, 2008 in New Features and search. Comments

Greetings Nestormaniacs,

Today we rolled out a tiny new feature to make your property searching even easier. In cases where we know it we now let you know if a listing has more photos than just the one we’re showing. See an example in this screen shot:

screenshot of more photos text

It’s all part of our never ending quest to bring you the most relevant search results. As with every tweak to the site, we’re keen to know what you think. Happy house hunting!

Ariadne Capital – ‘Looking for the future of search’

Published by Ed on January 14, 2008 in events and search. Comments

Fellow Nestordelphians,

Just a quick note, tomorrow I’ll be a member of a panel discussing “the future of search” at Ariande Capital’s 2nd Investor Forum. The lineup looks great. The discussion will focus on vertical search engines versus generalists, the tie in between mobile and search, innovation, and the integration of search with social networks. All worthy topics that should generate some interesting (and passionate) points of view. There will also be separate panels on digital music and mobile content.

If you’re in the audience please do say hello. I would love to hear all suggestions about what we could do better at Nestoria.

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