MoreWhite
a web 2.0 blog
The real estate search engine I’ve been working on for the past few months is now ready for (beta) action. Check it out, and let me know what you think. The engine uses a spider (written in C#, works under mono of course) to crawl some large agents (UK only for now) and extracts property information into a MySQL database. I’ve attempted to stick to LAMP environment as much as possible, except for the spider itself (although it would be interesting to implement it in PHP some day, as it is not performance focused). Everything is highly automated: crawling is done in many cases just by pointing the spider to the site, and I’m about to automate extraction completely.
The implementation is highly focused on tags. Locations are tags, so search is keyword driven, not map-driven. This should be more user-friendly, minimalistic, Google-like. I didn’t integrate it with google maps because that would require geocoding all addresses, and that costs $$$. The only other site that does something similar is ononemap which is completely map driven. I hope my approach will appeal to some, especially those not familiar with maps.
Some interesting features are:
- Autocompletion of locations (a-la Google Suggest)
- Related locations are shown to expand the search
- Multiple tags can be selected (eg. waterside, lift, porter) and de-selected
- Selecting tags and changing price filters updates properties in the background (ajax)
Many more things are to come, including RSS feeds for results, email alerts, and a REST API to allow mashups with the service. I’d love to start making this international, although trulia already has something similar for US.
ononemap.com is not the only site…
you have home.co.uk and yourpropertyfinder.co.uk
Love it. Very simple, and very well implemented. Want to have a chat?
Hey guys I like both your sites and would be interested in chattting as I have about 800 developments internationally on my site. Lets talk…
really cool, would love to work with u on this … based in London with international contacts. lets do something. hit me on email …
Very clean design. Easy to scan/uncluttered presentation of results. Obviously the autocompletion is quite fun… although some work needs to be done on unifying place names perhaps, eg Hampstead Gdn and Hampstead Gardens (may be genuinely different of course).
The tagging, while usually working very well, does break down occasionally when the context isn’t spotted. eg “a nice flat in a large house” gets tagged with both ‘flat’ and ‘house’ which could be confusing. I noticed the word ‘barn’ appeared in one description of a flat - and this then got used as a tag… when it definitely wasn’t a barn. Hard to get right admittedly.
A lot of your click-thoughs to Hamptons seem to be broken. The odd one to Foxtons doesn’t go though to the property - may be a search-result update issue.
Biggest gripe: HTML does not validate. http://validator.w3.org/
You get better search credit if it does.
Very nice to look at, to navigate and great idea to have it google like
well done guys!
Hey, Artemi, I love your site. Very nice. I love the minimalist interface and speed of searches. If you like I will put you in touch with the right people at Point2 to get a feed of all our listings. We have over 78,000 real estate agents world wide ( http://www.point2agent.com) that use our system and agents can opt in to have their listings aggregated at http://www.Point2homes.com where they are distributed to Google base, Yahoo classifieds, Trulia, Oodle, realestate.com etc. The problem with these sites are that none of them (except our Point2homes which is just our reference implementation) are international and we are starting to have international listings pour in. We currently have over 40,000 listings on this site and are adding over 500 per day.
In any case, I am very impressed with your site and would love to speak with you further. Great work!
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I love the interface. Very clean. Would it be possible to implement it with an MLS that allows downloading of listings?
I love the site, but I am wondering how does the site match the tags it collects when crawling to the correct position on the google map?