Nestoria is a vertical

search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

for real estate. In terms of users, Nestoria is the 5th largest property web site in the UK (February 2012 ) and the 9th in Spain ( comScore, May 2009 ). __TOC__

Overview

Nestoria aggregates real estate listings from property portals and provides location-based search to Internet users. Results can be sorted by relevance, freshness, distance and type of property.

Company

Javier Etxebeste and Ed Freyfogle, two former

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...

executives, founded Lokku Limited in April 2006. Lokku is based in Clerkenwell, London, UK. It is equity backed by private investors from UK and Spain. The first website brand Nestoria UK launched in June 2006, the Spanish website Nestoria España in May 2007, Nestoria Italia and Nestoria Deutschland in summer 2008. In March 2010 the company launched Nestoria Australia, followed by Nestoria France in July, Nestoria Brasil in November 2010 and Nestoria India in February 2011.

Websites

Nestoria is a case study of Google Maps API use and of the Yahoo! User Interface library. As a web application hybrid or mashup, Nestoria geo-locates properties on maps and combines them with

Point of Interest A point of interest (POI) is a specific point location that someone may find useful or interesting. An example is a point on the Earth representing the location of the Eiffel Tower, or a point on Mars representing the location of its highest m ...

of transport, schools, hospitals and other local information relevant to homes seekers. Nestoria, as a typical

Web 2.0 Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory) web and social web) refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and ...

operation, co-operates with collaborative projects such as

OpenStreetMap OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free, open geographic database updated and maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveys, trace from aerial imagery and also import from other freely licensed g ...

(open source mapping) or Geograph British Isles (photographs). It shares its property data via a web service with webmasters or through co-branded property search such as media outlets like

The Daily Telegraph ''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally. It was fo ...

Capital Capital may refer to: Common uses * Capital city, a municipality of primary status ** List of national capital cities * Capital letter, an upper-case letter Economics and social sciences * Capital (economics), the durable produced goods used f ...

, NWN Media and

Channel 4 Channel 4 is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network operated by the state-owned enterprise, state-owned Channel Four Television Corporation. It began its transmission on 2 November 1982 and was established to provide a four ...

Homes (TV-station). Other Web 2.0 feature include widgets and a

Facebook application The Facebook Platform is the set of services, tools, and products provided by the social networking service Facebook for third-party developers to create their own applications and services that access data in Facebook. The current Faceboo ...

. The company operates blogs in all the languages it operates in, and regularl
interviews thought-leaders
from the realm of internet technology and new media businesses. In January 2010 Nestoria won Yahoo!'s UK Application Platform Competition
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Criticism

As with other search engines, Nestoria's

search index Search engine indexing is the collecting, parsing, and storing of data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval. Index design incorporates interdisciplinary concepts from linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics, and ...

is as updated and accurate as the data obtained from its sources (property portals and websites), which in turn are fed from estate agents' data. The quality of the search results (e.g. if a house is still on the market or already sold) strongly depends on the motivation of local estate agents to upload accurate information and to update them regularly. In Spain, Brazil, France and Italy, the real estate market is based on non-exclusive contracts between property sellers and estate agents. Estate agents try not to disclose the precise location of the homes on the Internet. This prevents Nestoria from

geocoding Address geocoding, or simply geocoding, is the process of taking a text-based description of a location, such as an address or the name of a place, and returning geographic coordinates, frequently latitude/longitude pair, to identify a locatio ...

many properties accurately on a map.

References

External links