Every Wednesday on AltSearchEngines we hear from an Alternative Search Engine and let them brag about their project.  Today we cross the pond once again to visit the offices of Property Search engine Nestoria, based in London, U.K.  It is privately funded and was created in June 2006 by Javier Etxebeste and Ed Freyfogle, two former Yahoo! Europe senior managers.  Today’s tour is given by Ruben Martinez, SEO and SEM Manager for Nestoria.

Take it away, Ruben!

Nestoria makes it easy for users to find homes in London and the UK. We are a vertical search engine that aggregates homes listings from property portals in the UK. The current number of deduplicated (unique) property listings is more than 400,000. We believe that our database is second only in size to Rightmove, the largest UK property portal, in real terms.

Nestoria is a rarity among property search engines and property portals in that the site is totally text ad-free and banner-free. The interface is uncluttered and understated in the extreme; the focus is in driving visitors to exactly the search results they are looking for. The feel of the engine is of a snappy and quick database buzzing behind the scene, so we are not obsessed about designing a cool look or building fancy features: we list properties by relevancy, which is a challenge in its own right.

The engine delivers listings of homes for sale or to rent by location (Eg. Canary Wharf in London or city center in Birmingham) and pins them on a map. It allows further selections by price and number of bedrooms and offers local information about transport and schools in the area.

Web2.0 runs through our veins:

• Our technology is scalable and replicable: we launched Nestoria España, in May of 2007.
• We are a case study by Google in their use of the Google Maps API.
• Our blogs are one of the most active in the search engine arena in their respective countries. It is worth reading their feeds: http://blog.nestoria.co.uk and http://blog-nestoria.es
• Launched the Facebook application to search for flats and houses in both the UK and for the Spanish market (first non-English language applet)!

Our challenges:

• Making it understood to our new visitors that they are using a property search engine, not a traditional property portal, in that we aggregate the listings of the later and that we deliver genuinely relevant results.
• Not being perceived as a nuisance/menace by established and traditional property portals. We are not going to interfere in their relations with estate agents.

This completes our tour of European Property Search engines, having recently looked at Extate, Trovit, and Properazzi.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 1:53 pm and is filed under CEO Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Sphere: Related Content