Improvements to the API

We say we like people who share data, but sharing should always start at home, which is why Nestoria has an API which anyone can use to do cool stuff with Nestoria's data.  Every now and then the development side of the team have to force themselves to stop writing code and start writing documentation explaining the code, and over the last week or so one of our new summer interns has been tasked with documenting and updating the API – which applies directly to us AU readers, as the Australian metadata (ie average house price info) has been included.  Does that sound enticing to any developers out there?  How 'bout mashing house prices up with CBD proximity and public transport prices to find the optimum financial distance to live from the centre of town?  Or something?

The revamped API documentation system, with more readable layout, will hopefully make it easier to do just that. And a hundred other things you might want to do with Nestoria's information and we haven't even thought of yet.  Then when you've created your masterpiece, let us know about it and we'll include it in our application gallery where we put our favourite Nestoria related apps., also newly added. 

If the thing that piqued your interest most in the above was the fact that we have summer interns then get in touch.  An Australian summer intern during the Australian summer would be popular addition to the office. 

Nestoria Opera Widget

A proper milestone

What is Nestoria Rank?

To the people who use Nestoria to find their dream property Nestoria Rank is the behind the scenes magic that decides which properties are the best results for their search query

To our partners it's the same thing.  But we try to be a bit more revealing about how it works so that they understand that presenting users with the right property first time benefits them as well as the house hunters, even if it means that their listings don't appear at the top of every query.  To our partners we refer to Nestoria Rank as an algorithm rather than magic.  An algorithm using a few key scales, or metrics, that help decide the results returned for each query: relevancy, freshness, usability or quality and comprehensiveness.

Lots of people like to talk about comprehensiveness because the numbers are big, and lots of choice is good right?  True, but as far as we're concerned giving people hundreds of properties to choose from isn't necessarily Nestoria at it most useful.  That irritating thing about less being more holds true if less equals more perfectly matched results. Which is what vertical search is about.

Relevancy relies in part on the level of search detail house hunters can provide us with.  Which is helped along by us adding new ways for property hunters to refine their search.  Things like allowing people to refine their search by insisting on a balcony or garage.

As well as by the number of bedrooms, and/ or bathrooms, and by location and price. 

Which means searches like this one for a rental property in Mt. Lawley, Perth, with three or more bedrooms, two or more bathrooms, a balcony and a garage, priced from $700 are possible.  We have four properties currently matching this description.

Freshness isn't about the age of a property – though that's another thing you can filter your search for, but we call it 'new builds' – it's about the age of the listing.  How long a property has been on the market is relevant information for house hunters, so we allow them to refine their search by the freshness of the listing. 

Usability and quality refer to the information that Nestoria is given by the real estate agents via our portal partners.  A lot of testing has gone on since Nestoria UK was launched in 2006, and from those tests we've learned that house hunters appreciate information – be that in the form of photos of the property, specific prices and descriptions that provide them with any details we don't have a search refining tool for.  We've done our best to help out with that as well, by providing as much information about the local area as possible in the form of adding map pins marking schools, transport and other local services.  But it helps if our partners understand why we're asking them for so much detail.

The bottom line is that if we're able to give house hunters the best lot of results first time round they'll be happy.  And as far as our partners go Nestoria Rank dramatically improves the ratio between the number of serious enquiries they get and the number of people who take a peek and move on.  And we get a happy buzz about the awesomeness of our search technology.  So everyone's a winner. 

It's time...

It's time... For a while this blog was promising things that we just couldn't show you physically because the interesting, working, part of the site wasn't quite ready for use.   So I couldn't share such joys as 'the moment when we worked out how to properly list properties for rent in Sale, Victoria' with you...

But the time of that non-interactive outline drawing of Australia has passed: Nestoria Australia is ready! So don't waste anymore time reading this post and head right over to it to have a look and a play...  But before you do: whenever we launch in a new country there's always some things we don't get right straight away, so please let us know if you see any problems or have any suggestions.

If you're a patient soul and you're reading beyond the photo of us proud Nestorian parents celebrating the launch, (note the upside-down map of Europe behind us suggesting how keen we are to take on an Australian perspective) then I'll reiterate how interested we are in your feedback: Our main aim is always to help people find their next home to rent or buy as quickly and easily as possible, so the plan is that over the upcoming months we learn from how nestoria.com.au is being used and make sure it's finely tuned to the interests and habits of the Australian house hunting market.

One of Nestoria's founders, Ed Freyfogle, will be out in Australia in May if you want a personal introduction to the site, but you're always welcome to chat to us anytime.  You can have a look at Ed's announcement on the UK blog if you're still hungry for more chat about the launch.

Less is more when it comes to pageviews

Normally websites pride themselves on generating a large number of pageviews from visitors - it means people are hanging around on their site for a while, looking at a few things – but for a vertical search like Nestoria the quicker we can give visitors exactly what they want the better.  A couple of weeks ago there was some intensive testing done on the UK site to help expedite people to their ideal listing, and the results: in technical speak Nestoria has gone to a full AJAX implementation.   In layman's terms that basically means that the search information inputted is remembered when the sliders or map is moved so the lists should still have the most relevant content in them.  The good news for the Australian site is that we'll automatically inherit the improvements.

Nestoria can always get better though, so there are always all sorts of tests going on on the sites to see how we can make it even easier to match people and homes.  If you have any suggestions it's always the time to speak up.

Augmented Reality Nestoria

It was only a few short weeks ago that the words Augmented Reality were first typed into this blog, but in the world of technology things can move pretty quickly – assisted by the hard work of the rest of the Nestoria team, and the fact that they'd known about it for quite a while longer – and today it's possible to see, yes see with your own eyes, what it's like to search for Nestoria property listings on your mobile device using AR.

The Nestoria AR app is part of a suite of useful information you can find on the Samsung Layar service which you can see at work here, popping property information up onto your screen in real time.  In the case of this video, made by the fair hands of Nestoria's Nomsa and Matteo just outside the London offices, you're watching it on the Samsung Galaxy, which runs Android OS, which is the Google version of the iPhone OS.

If you want to find out a bit more about how Samsung and Layar are working together there's an interesting interview with Nick Turner-Samuels from Samsung Mobile UK on the UK blog.

 

What our older siblings are up to

The first week of the new year is a bit of a limbo week.  A bit too early for getting the teeth stuck into new projects 'cause not everyone is back from their holidays yet, it's a good week for reflection, so a good opportunity to report on Nestoria Australia's older siblings, Nestoria UK, Nestoria Germany, Nestoria Spain and Nestoria Italy.

Nestoria UK is the oldest at three years of age, and is growing at the same healthy rate most three year olds do, despite 2009 being a difficult year for the property industry.  This year Nestoria UK gained several new partners, including some you might recognise: AOL and Gumtree, was a sponsor of several relevant technology events including the London Perl Workshop and the UK Scale Camp - is it wrong that we often end up sponsoring the drinks? - and launched the test site 'Where Can I Live', which is a tool that helps you choose where to live based on transport and commuting.  If you've ever experienced a London tube you'll know the true value of this idea, but it will potentially be a godsend in Australia's major cities as well.

The API got some attention and Nestorfans responded to this well, by using it to build more cool things, including some nice iphone apps – we like that a lot.

Nestoria Germany and Nestoria Spain both turned two, so there was a lot of focus on making improvements based on feedback from local users.  Germany said “Can you increase the size of the images in the lists? and can the API have the ability to search by number of bathrooms?”, and Nestoria said “Ja!” In 2009 the Nestoria Germany search was also made available on several other sites, including GoYellow, the German Yellow Pages.
Nestoria Spain welcomed several new partners in 2009, and Nestoria's experimental side, Lokku Labs, tested out a Spanish full text search facility and tried out the 'Where Can I Live' feature on Barcelona and Madrid.

Nestoria Italy celebrated its first birthday by building up the numbers of listings and improving coverage, signing off on several new important portal partnerships.  Commuters in Rome and Milan were also given the “Where Can I Live' treatment.

The team also bonded in Bilbao and learned some bushcraft skills just in case the property market totally collapsed and the team had to revert to their humble hunter/ gatherer roots.

Putting our content where our blog text is

All this talk about finding interesting data and mashing it together and pinning it down to a map - if you don't mind the rough housing description - may make you wonder what Nestoria is doing to promote this sort of thing – apart from getting excited about it on the blog.    Nestoria is putting its content where it's blog text is, by making our API available to developers  interested in mashing or layering it up or using it to create something new and exciting on the web.

The Nestoria API has been around since the early days when you could get a thumbnail, details of the property and a link for more information, but it's undergone a lot of improvements and updates since then; including increasing the image sizes and allowing different kinds of search filtering, from highest and lowest prices to land size or number of bathrooms.

The Nestoria team have watched with interest and sometimes excitement as a whole range of cool things have been done with the data on the API, the current faves are  iphone applications UKProperty, Locati and Property Near Me.

As yet no one has mashed up Nestoria's average house price data, and some senior members of the Nestoria team would love to see that happen if anyone has any ideas...

If you're not a developer the API might sound a bit beyond you, but that's not going to stop you from having your own co-branded version of Nestoria onto which you can cut and paste property lists and listings and embed dropin maps into – this is all available at the exceptional good value price of free.

As of yet the Australian site isn't accessible, but it's only a matter of time.

A Very Nestorian Christmas

I'm new to Nestoria, as are you dear Australian blog readers, so I thought you might like to see some of the folks behind the site in the digitalised flesh at the annual team trip to Blibao.  As Ed Freyfogle so rightly said on the UK Blog: “All work and no play makes for a very dull vertical search engine indeed.”, so every year at Christmas the team heads out to northern Spain to celebrate and brainstorm in a different environment.

The usual order of events includes body boarding in the frigid December waters of a European sea, but this year that bracing joy was replaced by something a lot more of us would consider enjoyable: a bang up Basque meal cooked by the team under the careful supervision of an experienced chef at a traditional gastronomic society.

With different teams in charge of putting together different courses there was always going to be a competitive edge to the event – the Nestorians are programmed to please – but it was hard to think of there being any losers considering everyone got to sit down to the feast in the end, in the company of some local partners who deserved to be thanked for their support after a tough year for real estate businesses.

Hope your own Christmas meal was as enjoyable.