search.ch just launched the new beta real estate search (immo.beta.search.ch). It is one of the last projects that I started when I was still CTO at search.ch and it's great to finally see it online. See the post on the company blog (in german) for more details.
It aggregates objects from about 20 real estate sites in Switzerland, constantly adding more. It even includes sites that offer rooms for students.
It's AJAX all over the place. With neat details like to incrementally loading result list on the left, the small bar charts above the sliders (so that you know wether you have to allow higher prices or smaller flats, or just get a general feeling for an area), updated in real time.
You will see all available objects in the map, and the ones visible in the list at the left are highlighted (try scrolling and see how they change). Actually just missed objects are also still on the map. One of the neat feature the team added after I left is the behavior there: The non-matching criteria is highlighted red and when you click it the according slider is adjusted to include this object.
Another nice part is the list management. Looking for the next flat or house is a process that goes on for a longer time, so you'll want to keep track of what you liked, tossed out again and so on. You can mark objects and you can keep notes. Best of all, when you return you get the exact same query that you had when you left last time and all the new objects since your last (and the one before) are separated by a marker.
The search.ch team did an excellent job, I'm proud of them! Congrats!
Update: A small translation table until the site is translated:
Wohnung, Einfamilienhaus, Ferien, Mehrfamilienhaus, Büro, Garage, Grundstück: Appartment, Single Family Home, Cottage, Multi Family Home, Office, Parking lot, land
mieten, kaufen: rent, buy
Preis, Zimmer, Fläche, Ort: Price, Rooms, Area, "Where".
Andreas Göldi has a brilliant analysis on the classifieds market as follow-up his earlier and my post (thanks for the kind words!).
He nicely structures the discussion: He observes that we are talking about a market, and as such a system that works better when liquidity increases and transaction costs decreases.
Many of the suggestions in my last post can be catalogued under the transaction costs aspect, which are mainly outside the actual cost to publish a classified, just as Andreas notes. Thinking about it, lowering could grow the classifieds market manifold; or maybe this already happened, just look what is sold on ebay that nobody would put in the classifieds section of a newspaper.
Then Andreas splits liquidity in two factors: Presence and positioning. Presence, i.e. the cost of just being in the market, is quickly driven to zero by the aggregators and things like Google Base (Forget about usability gripes, the important point of Google Base is really to lower the entry barrier to put stuff on the web, something that will drive Google's bottom line - along with allmost other's bottom lines - in a much more significant way than anything to do with competing with craigslist. [Update: Or so I thought... Apparently Google is going the wrong way here]). Full agreement here.
But on the positioning, I'm not so sure, at least in this case. His point is that one could essentially sell ranking, exchanging money for a better position in a market. But for many important categories I don't have a problem specifying my query precise enough, that I can browse through all matching ads, thus ranking is not important. It would be easy to look at all classifieds for flats in Zurich in a given size and price range, and in fact many people do that and currently go to all the sites and read all the papers to not miss any.
(Yes, ranges are actually not that useful tools, but users usually give extra room to include ads just outside their range to double check. In fact we tried relevance ranking for real estate for a couple of years in immo.search.ch - you can just enter a target price and size and the engine will rank ads by proximity to this values, giving cheaper/bigger a slight preference - and it works quite well but in the end never got the traction with the users, thus in summary I think the idea was rejected by the market. And in fact the next version of immo.search.ch will swap these features out for something else...)
Back to positioning: Of course, one could sell the appearance of non-matching (maybe by a short margin) ads. Of course strictly separated from actual search results, please. But then again, a good site would be able to generate good suggestions here anyway and besides, in the classifieds case this looks like a rather small opportunity.
Thus, positioning so far makes sense where
"Too many results" is subjective and while some wouldn't mind skimming real estate ads half an hour per day, for others this is too much. But since the cost of a suboptimal decision outweigh time saving by just taking the first offer, these persons rather create an own market for assisting them (Andreas mentions this, too). And tools and methods for increasing skimming speed and accuracy will be what differentiates future aggregator sites.
Thus, I think positioning isn't where the profits will move in the case of classifieds. If, then only for the jobs market, which exhibits its own very complicated dynamics and very high transaction costs; my gut feeling is that this part will take different directions than all other categories in a big way anyway. Sounds about right, since that is very the aggregators will be and there (unlike for general search like Google) entry costs will be low and thus profits will move somewhere else in the value chain. Which doesn't mean that the operational profit for these outlets won't be handsome, but they most probably won't take the billions that are left on the table by slow moving newspapers (sorry guys).
Will the money be in lowering transaction costs? And if transaction costs go down and the market grows, who will profit? The sellers, the buyers (or the new class of seller-and-buyer), the new middlemen?
Jürg blogs about language selection on web pages over at the namics blog (in german). He wrote up his guidelines, most of which are quite sensible, but also read the comments for a good discussion.
As a contribution to the discussion, I'd like to explain how we did this at search.ch: In general, very similarly to his guidelines, i.e. the language selection is in the upper right corner and the labels are text and in the destination language (a few pages still have the selection in the history/navigation bar at the left, but the upper right corner is really where it should be).
But the interesting details are within the initial detection and the URIs. An URI could end in help.html, but also in help.en.html; exactly how Apache content negotiation suggests, i.e. the first one would trigger automatic language detection, the second one is fixed on english. The important difference is in how the links in these pages look. We took great care (and credit for this goes to Urban Müller) to keep the links on those documents in the same style. That is, the help.html document would come in the user's language (e.g. german) but wouldn't contain language links (e.g. .de.html). Thus, the url would also reflect the information the user put into the system: The language was only set if it was actually overrided by the user. Since the language is usually guessed right, this keeps nice and tidy URIs (directory indices go from /index.de.html to /!) for most users, and even more importantly doesn't leave to much information in the URI when it is used in a link or an email! Unless the user explicitly set the language, automatic language detection will still work when the user comes from an external link.
Another detail was, that we override an automatic detection of english with german. This might be a special situation that suits only for search.ch, but let's look at the reasons. Tests (comparing the language of queries with the detected language) showed, that english-instead-of-german was the most common mistake in detecting. Quite obvious actually, since still many people prefer to install their computers in english (I do) and then don't change the browser settings. And german is the most common language in Switzerland. And this wrong detection is quite a loss since many parts of the site (e.g. news) are not available in english. On the other hand, by the nature of the site search.ch an english speaking user who doesn't understand german would still get quite far in the wrong language. Thus, the false positives for english were worse than the false negatives are now after the overriding.
Of course, both differences are small details in the big picture, but for a fraction of the users getting those right matters a lot. As does hiding the details from all the others.