Dear friends,
It’s 03h07 on Monday morning, Art’s base speaker is bouncing, the office is bubbling, and we’re about to set off some fireworks.
Our beloved search engine is about to escape from beta. And, to mark the occasion, we’re setting light to Web2.0 naming schemas.
Friends, today we’re launching
Well done on launching, I’ve been using the site for months now and it is excellent.
At least it was, but now you have made the map view small.
Please bring back the full screen map view, without it the site just becomes another property search engine and I may as well just use Rightmove if I wanted just a search engine.
Andy, bear with us for a moment: we’ll be launching some mapping tweaks in due course. 
Please tell me that the map tweaks will also mean that all the results are shown on the map, like they used to be. Having just the current page of results shown again reduces the site to just a search engine rather than the excellent property map browser that it was before.
@Andy: when the map is visible, all of the search results that can be geocoded are shown on the map, not just the current page!
Thanks Artmemi, I see that now. I also see that you have added a splitter so that I can make the map vertically bigger, would be nice if I didn’t have to resize every time I changed a search criteria.
However, you are still missing one of the features you had when in beta. Back then the location search just centered the map, it didn’t limit the results. That meant that you could continue to browser around the map and see results that matched your criteria outside of the limited area that you searched for.
I far preferred the old behaviour, though I can understand you might have changed it because of worries about the old behaviour scaling to large numbers of users.
Keep up the good work…
Ah, I think I’ve found a way to get the original geographical search behaviour, kind of. Wildcards
@Andy: the map now shows only the results you’d see in list view. If you want to browse outside the search area, simply search for something bigger. For example instead of searching for “chelsea” search for “london” and browse away )
That is great in theory Artemi, but doesn’t work in practice. Clearly not all the properties have the right address data on them for that to work.
For example if you search for “KT20″ you will see half a dozen or so properties around Lower Kingswood. If you search for “Surrey” and zoom into the same area you only see one property (which incidentally doesn’t appear on the “KT20″ search).
So I’m afraid in its current form the site is far less useful than it was in the beta.
Hi guys, Nice Site.
Just a question, how do you know when the homes are of the market, My understanding is that you have created many feeds to scrape and trawl the web, do you have contact with those agencies to know when to take the listing off?
Thanks
Atif
@andy: Thanks for the feedback, turns out you found a small bug in our indexer
Those queries should work as you’d expect now, in that ‘KT20′ results will be a subset of ‘Surrey’ results……
XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
10 Comments
Jump to comment form | comments rss [?] | trackback uri [?]