Zoomf - web 2.0 vertical search
is a venture of my friend Mike Carter, who used to be our UK contact at Doubleclick. He and his colleagues (who’ve done this from scratch) are very excited about it and tell me it’s the first web 2.0 vertical search application. Why is this interesting for me:
- I’m really excited some people I know have done such a cool thing from scratch, and it does look to me like a potential money-spinner
- It does use Ajax a lot to improve usability, and it works really well (even on my Mac at home)
- Google Maps, obviously
- Its primary data source isn’t some nice easy web service that any of us could use - they’ve written a web spider that crawls estate agency websites, pulling the unstructured property data out and putting it into a common format that they can search
The spider is really interesting: they have a browser plug-in they wrote, that allows them to paint the data fields on a web page and teach the spider what to pull back from where. They’ve written all this validation code so if the website owner changes the layout, it gets spotted.
Anyway, it’s interesting for a geek like me, but I think it’s also an interesting business idea. We all assume Google and some of the other big guys have search sewn up, but there are niches people will do well in, and this looks like it could be one of those.
What do you think?
Firstly this not the first of these websites that scrapes property from the web….there are a few now (www.nestoria.co.uk etc) ….seems that most of them including Zoomf are simply copying the US site www.trulia.com…(take a look at the results page !!) To me the site has no value at all as it only crawls a few of the biggest agents in London. I can build a few scripts to do that in a couple of days. Why not go to www.findaproperty.co.uk or www.primelocation.co.uk they have far more properties.
There are thousands of estate agents sites in the UK so unless the index is at least 75% complete I cannot see why anyone would use the site. Also I hear that Trulia is not doing too well for the very same reason…
Hi Dan
We completely agree. You point out the major reason for consumers to use these types of websites, comprehensiveness. That is where we plan on going for London in Q1 next year and then beyond London afterwards. And by comprehensive, I mean more properties in total than any of the major players. We are currently ramping our listing numbers and growing our product featureset.
As far as trulia is concerned, we are taking a different approach to them as the dynamics of the US property space is quite different to our own here in the UK. Interestingly enough, move.com, a major US property site has switched from the Paid-inclusion model to free-to-list.