English
Gartoo has all the properties in its database classified as “house” or “flat”, for “sale” or to “rent”, etc. While we were good at organizing our data by property type, when Gartoo UK was launched in 2009, we didn’t know how our users would query our search engine. Would they expect for instance that the engine understands whether their queries are about buy or to rent? We were not confident either of understanding the nature of many search queries by our visitors.
The solution
We displayed a ‘buy’ and a ‘rent’ button next to the search box. Admittedly, we just didn’t know whether users would prefer to hit a button to precise the transaction type they were interested in.
The reality check
We found out later that users do search properties for sale and only when they are interested in letting, they include a keyword in the query, eg “to rent”, “rental”, etcSo we tried another solution: showing results only for the transaction type “buy” and simplify the interface with a single button reading “search”. Users with an interest in renting instead of buying would only need to type a term relative to renting in their query.
You may also notice that we can upper case a few sensible words on the queries, such as location names (“North Folk” in the example) but not verbs (eg. “to let”).
What does Gartoo understand now
In most cases, Gartoo determines whether a query with the terms of house types such as “cottage” are more related to a property type “house” that, for instance a “flat”. The software generally finds whether the query is about rent or sale, identifies many locations by their name and interprets the number of bedrooms specified in the query.
For instance writing on Gartoo the query “2 bedroom flat to rent in SW8” results in property listings of flats with rent prices in the postcode SW8 in London. You don’t need to tell the engine, it will understand it for you. We do even preset the filter options to property type ‘flat’ and no. of bedrooms.
