Here at AltSearchEngines we’re continually exposed to new innovation in the search engine market. All over the world people are working hard to build the next Google or Yahoo!. Which is why we took notice when we recently learned of a tiny start up based 1000’s of miles from Silicon Valley that has been used as a case study by both Google and Yahoo!.

Nestoria is a European property search engine we’ve covered in the past. They are used as the Google maps case study and were recently featured on the Yahoo! User Interface blog as well for some of their design innovation.












To find out more about why they have been singled out for this double honor, we talked to Ed Freyfogle, co-founder of Nestoria.

Ed, can you give us the 5 cent tour?
Sure. We’re a very small team of internet veterans based in London. We focus on one thing: helping people find their next home as quickly and easily as possible. We launched our UK property search engine in the summer of 2006 and our Spanish property search engine in May of 2007. Things have gone well ever since.

What have been the key pieces to Nestoria’s success?
We’ve put together a very skilled and motivated team with deep experience in all aspects of search (paid and organic). We work hard to deliver the best user experience possible. We’ve been fortunate to be able to build on top of lots of great software – be it standard opensource tools like perl and mysql, or the tools from the internet giants like the Yahoo User Interface library or Google Maps. We’ve also been very lucky to partner with many local UK and Spanish sites.

A lot of start ups are skilled and work hard though, what is it exactly that has allowed Nestoria to differentiate itself from the rest?
One thing we feel strongly about in the team is that we really have no idea what we’re doing. None of us has ever bought a home in the UK for example. Instead we measure everything that happens on the website and then incrementally improve based on the numeric feedback we get from 1000s of Nestoria users.

What are the plans for continued international expansion? Will we see Nestoria in the US?
We’ve been approached by some players in the North American market, but right now it’s not a focus for us. We’re looking at other European markets. Each market is very different both in terms of user behavior and market structure, so we have to be smart about keeping the software scalable and still meeting the business requirements. We’re always looking for ways to partner – hopefully we’ll have some announcements to make in this respect shortly. Anyone who is interested should get in please touch.



Recognition by Yahoo and Google is a big accomplishment. How do you plan to top it?
Well we’d love to be featured by Facebook – after all we did build the first non-English language Facebook application back in June. In seriousness though, while it’s great that the team’s work is recognized we still have a very long way to go.One thing we’re excited about as heavy user of APIs of other sites is seeing more and more people using our API – like the recently launched UKPropertVision – and our widgets. We now have very comprehensive databases of 450,000 homes to buy and rent in the UK and over 500,000 in Spain. We go through a lot of effort to geolocate the listings, remove spam and duplicates, etc. This is an amazing dataset. We also recently opened up access to ‘meta data’ and house price widgets.

So some things have gone well. What are some mistakes you’ve made with Nestoria?
Like any project when you look back you can always point to things that could have gone better, or design paths we shouldn’t have strayed down. On the whole we try to have a pretty vibrant internal debate process that hopefully allows us to catch mistakes early.

How did you come up with the name ‘Nestoria‘?
When we were looking to set up the company in the UK, we did all kinds of research into what would be an appropriate name for our baby, the easiest way to find UK property. We trawled through page after page of books claiming to provide everything we needed to make that once in a lifetime decision.  Alas 20,000 suggestions later we were still unconvinced.We needed something with real pizzaz, something weighty and meaningful.So we donned our latex gloves and headed for the British Museum’s most secure and sacred vaults. Through a personal academic contact, we were able to gain access to thousand year-old texts barely scoured by the human eye. During our fourth day in the vaults, whilst unbundling yet another tome, a small scrap of yellowed parchment swayed to the floor. Our friend at the museum quickly identified the note to be from the hand of Vincentius the 3rd. Translated, the note told of expeditions to Londinium and the many wonderful new experiences to be had there. Vincentius made heavy use of derivations of the ancient Latin stem ‘nestor’ which has been translated to mean ‘to search and find’.With the team running low on food and water, we took this as a sign. The site must be called ‘nestor’. Not catchy. Nestoria. Much better.And so there you have it, the solid, precious history of the name ‘Nestoria’.

What’s the best way to stay informed about Nestoria?
Please subscribe to our blog in English or Spanish. We post regularly about new features. We also use the Nestoria Users Group on Facebook (Facebook registration required) as a forum for hearing what people have to say about Nestoria.

And of course they can read about any updates here on AltSearchEngines. Yes, of course.Thanks for that great update, Ed!

If our readers have a question regarding Nestoria, please leave a comment and we’ll see they get it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 7:17 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.