Yes I know, yawn, but this one does show a little potential! Now I am sitting here eating my breakfast (Muesli, Pear, Apples and Bananas) and the first thing I did was swear ‘&%$#@$%’ and splatter my screen with the above mentioned ingredients.
The quote ‘but our users call us ‘The Google of Real Estate‘, no, you call yourself that and you are not alone! The site seems to scrape (I may be wrong) listings from LJ Hooker, Ray White, Centrury21, PRD Nationwide, Harcourts, Raine and Horne, Elders, First National and others and index these results into a Google style engine. The properties then link to the actual pages on the above sites.
The search is simple and the results darn ugly but it does have some potential. Getting this data and indexing it is one thing, but they must be able to update quickly so as to not carry older listings. They also have to overcome the fact that their bots may be banned from the site if they do not have permission.
However, this site is getting closer to what I would call a search engine, as these types of sites mature their bots will have to become smarter and smarter as if they do become popular there are ways in which agents could manipulate data to appear more often.
They need to get the layout of search results cleaner and more organised but on the whole a good first effort. Using whereis.com.au may bite them a little as I would have chosen Google, Yahoo or MSN maps.
They have clearly tried to copy Google with their search results and this is a good thing, but it just needs a little more refinement. I would be interested to see how they crawl individual agents sites as many are formatted differently and this is where they can do quite well if they got it right.
You can add your agency for inclusion or pay for a rapid inclusion. Your thoughts?