99.co Presents: The Magic Behind Quality Listings

At 99.co we sincerely believe that our product is g— scratch that, our product rocks! Seriously though, we are really proud of our product and would love to share it with the world. So why are we so over-the-top about our property search engine? The answer boils down to a belief we have that ListRank, our brainchild, is proving itself to be quite the prodigy.

Property search engine, ListRank, brainchild, prodigy, say what? Let’s break this down. 99.co has been designed as a property search engine, not just a marketplace for property. This matters, because it means that our service is not just such that it provides property listings, it means it provides the right listings.

Behind our search engine stands a computer program that goes by the name of ListRank, designed to rank property listings in terms of quality. The idea is that the higher the quality of the listing, the higher up it should rank in customers’ search results, something which in turn translates to a better and fairer customer experience. Where have we seen this before? That’s right: Google

Ever wondered why Google knows everything? Okay, okay, granted,  it does not know everything – but it is darn good at providing you with the almost-exactly, near-perfect answer to your inquiry. So how is it done? The simple version of the answer is algorithms, the difficult one is nodes, spiders, crawlers and indexes. Never mind those – algorithms! Yes, algorithms are computer programs that, amongst other things, help us find clues as to what you mean when you enter something into the search bar.

Let’s take a step back, why do we need algorithms again? Well, the internet has grown out into a vast, exciting, scary, strange, but especially vast place, and when you search for something on the net, you want one or two answers not trillions of webpages. Algorithms help us to find you answers, and the better the algorithm, the more chance we will find the right answer for you.

Taking two steps forward, an algorithm then is a computer program that uses a series of factors – or data points – to determine the quality of the piece it analyses. Let’s have an example, just because we love examples: imagine you want to find a nice pizza restaurant somewhere around East Coast. You probably will type something into the search bar that includes “pizza”, “restaurant”, and “East Coast”, right?

Now, as you click enter, the algorithm will burst into activity, and reaching into the vast depths of the web it will find and subsequently rank all web pages that may best address your inquiry – in this case Etna Italian Restaurant & Pizzeria, Al Forno, and Spizza  turn up on top. As you can see, those webpages with the highest quality and relevance to your keywords are ranked at the top of your search; it seems like there is quite a bit of magic happening between the moment that you type in your inquiry and the instance Google gives you the answers.

Back to 99.co, fundamentally we are doing what Google is doing on a smaller scale. While Google’s algorithm deals with round about everything, we restrict ourselves to property listings. In this vein, we designed ListRank (our algorithm, remember) to rank listings of property in terms of quality, using more than 30 different factors (think quality of pictures, detail of information, or proximity to your specified location), which together encompass the overall quality of the listing.

We are very serious – some may say obsessed – about the quality of our listings. What do we mean by this? It means that we have a team of software engineers continuously adapting our algorithm to retain and improve the ranking of quality content on our website. Consequently, when you are searching for your new home, the highest quality listings will be ranked orderly in your search results, and by extension you will be more likely to easily find a new home you’ll love.

Still a little dazzled by all this algorithm stuff? Check out this great infographic by Google on how it works. Basically, downscale what Google has to property listings only, swap their algorithm for ListRank, add a bunch of real-estate specific – and awesome – features, and you have 99.co.

Starting to see why we are so excited about our product?

Ready to find the home you’ll love? Go to 99.co!