Product Strategy
Sulekha Real estate legal section powered by 100floors
The real estate legal section in Sulekha.com is now powered by 100floors
As we have mentioned on this blog - our legal services is a strategic business unit within 100floors and we looking forward to helping you to solve real estate / property related legal issues.
To view the Real estate legal section go to the Sulekha Real estate section and click on Legal or you can go directly to the 100floors legal section on Sulekha.
Watch for this space - we have more announcements on strategic alliances coming soon.
100floors.com - product updates
As you know, we did a quick re-branding of our product from my100floors.com to 100floors.com based on the feedback we got from several of our early adopters as well as for easier brand reach and recall.
With that, we also launched some new product features primarily around SMS and email communication and better user touch points which they think are critical for a better user experience.
So with little drumroll, we launch - Click2SMS and Click2Email for listings. You can use these features to quickly communicate with listing owners and also get rapid responses for your listings on 100floors.
We also offer Click2call - a service using which we can we dial you up along with the listing owner and connect both of you, however at this point this service is available only for premium listings. If you are interested in having click2call integrated with your listing, give us at shout at info@suksh.com or leave a message on our Contact us page.
As always, we would to hear feedback from you, tell us what is working, what is not, and we will continue to work to provide you with better listings from real people.
Understanding spatial search
So what is spatial search ?
In today’s context, where the Internet is the starting point for finding any information you need about anything in the world, and of course most of us use Google. The problem with traditional search is that it does not support or have information about the geographical dimension.
Why is spatial search important ?
This becomes extremely important when searching for something like “Guest houses in Bangalore”. Although the geographical location, in this case ‘Bangalore’ can be used as a part of search query term, the search engine does not interpret it as a geographical location. So results for the search query - “Guest houses in Bangalore” will turn up documents with “Guest houses” and “Bangalore” and might not show up results with guest houses koramangala or indiranagar which are localities in Bangalore and also hence very apt results. This is because, the search engine does not have a relationship between these terms.
The other issue with traditional search in entities like homes is that the geographical information of these locations are not known, and hence they cannot be visualized on a map - which would be the most intuitive way to visualize these results.
While planning and architecting my100floors, we understood the need for Spatial search and helping users visualize home searches on maps. Moreover we felt that that searching for properties on maps was the intuitive way to find properties. In fact, we are the first to provide a map based search in India, cracking the problem of non-availability of geo-coded data.
The next post will talk about our implementation of Spatial search in, challenges we faced and a walk through of the user experience.
