Be more specific in your search
As you may have heard, Goolge is a good search engine that gives relevant results. Right? Google has relevant results? Yes if you think 1,170,000 results when searching for homes in West University Place in Houston, TX is relevant. You just wanted home listings, but instead you get a few home ideas and a bunch of other results of Web sites that have West University somewhere on the sites’ pages. What you really wanted were listings of homes in the West University area.
How can you get these type of “relevant” results? Through subject-specific or vertical search engines such as Zillow.com and Trulia.com. Both of these are real estate search engines that give visitors the listings they are looking for. Trulia, for example, looks at thousands of sites and serves up the listings, so that the visitor does not have to travel to those sites. Once the results come up the visitor can sort by price, bedrooms, bathrooms, square feet and property types. Trulia also offers a lot of other services that are very useful in a home search such as neighborhood guys and pricing trends.
The irony is that Trulia uses Google Maps to show the location of the homes in the listings. With that said, I imagine it is only a matter of time before they are absorbed by Google, and added the search giant’s arsenal of cool tools.
What I find interesting about subject-specific search engines, is that they do not look like the ordinary search engine. Trulia provides a lot of other helpful real estate information besides home listings. I see subject-specific search engines playing a large role in the search industry’s future. The majors have already made movements in that direction, and offer quality vertical search products, such as Yahoo! Finance. There are hundreds more out there.
When you think about it, 1,170,000 results is good when considering the billions of pages indexed by Google. Most likely they are kind of relevant to what you are looking for, but if you have an option to use a subject-specific engine to find exactly what you are looking for, you sould step-out of your comfort zone and try something new with vertical search. It’s the future, really.
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Comments (3 comments)
[…] See how far we have come, and how far we need to go in order to continue to provide relevant results to our customers. What is the next big thing social search, subject-specific, clustering? Who knows. Whatever it is, it should be fun. […]
Mateosquared’s iSearch » A Nostalgic Perspective On Search / November 27th, 2006, 3:38 pm / #
[…] In the spirit of the shopping season, I thought I would let you know about a great FireFox add-on that will let you search over 50,000 merchants from one place. Pronto.com is a price comparison search engine (subject-specific), that allows you to find thousands of different products ranging from electronics and computers to home and garden products. The cool part and differintiator, is that you do not have to even go to the site. Pronto sits in your browser, and shows up when you are searching for products on product sites. For example, I was on Buy.com looking for an sd memory card. I came to Kingston 2GB secure digital card page, and Pronto popped up with an option to compare the price of this product at two other merchants. The ironic thing is that Buy.com was not one of the merchants. This is a very helpful service, and the alert is very unobtrusive, nor does it take up a lot of resources when it activates. I am interested to see what merchants will say when their products are not showing up. If Pronto gets the scale and traffic to affect merchants traffic and overall revenue, this could be fun to watch. […]
Mateosquared’s iSearch » Pronto.com - 50,000 merchants at your fingertips / November 28th, 2006, 1:45 pm / #
The problem with Zillow (I haven’t looked at Trulia) is that it tries to give you relevant information about neighborhoods (recent sales, “appraised values”, etc.) but in reality the data is junk. I have very rarely seen any numbers given on that site that are accurate.
Zillow is a part of the do-it-yourself real estate trend, and only makes things worse in my opinion. Realtors still provide a valuable service, as any real estate transaction is more intricate than people realize.
I do get the gist of your post, however. Google’s results are way too broad, and there has to be a better way. I am continually impressed with Google’s array of apps. I use Gmail, spreadsheets, the mobile Gmail app on my smartphone, Google toolbar, Google maps (on my phone and computer), and Google Earth. They just seem to produce some really relevant applications!
curtis lawson / November 29th, 2006, 2:53 am / #
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