| I've been working on a project that lets you search for properties in London (UK, not Ontario) with a huge number of filters. Property agents in England typically put very little effort into writing useful listings and the dominant search engine, Rightmove, has barely changed in 20 years. So you have to collate information from a lot of sources – and it takes a lot longer than it should – to find properties that satisfy your criteria. Currently my search engine does a decent job of finding matching properties, but there are so many filters that there’s a big discoverability issue. So I built this natural language interface as a first attempt at addressing the problem. You type in things like “2-bed garden flats over 800 sq ft with lots of storage, away from major roads, in safe areas with good primary schools, max price 850k, max 45 mins by tube to Buckingham Palace” and the tool will spit out properties that match your criteria. There’s a lot more to do to make it truly usable: it doesn’t always understand what you’re searching for, it only supports a small subset of the main website’s filters and there’s plenty of work to do on the UI (e.g. making filters editable). Most importantly the current incarnation doesn’t even address the discoverability issue. Currently I’m thinking this could work quite well as a back-and-forth conversation with a “virtual realtor” who guides you through the search a bit, but that’s TBD. Anyway, let me know what you think! I’m especially curious as to how it stacks up vs. the information-dense UI on the main website: https://findmyarea.co.uk/ |