Improved searching: "Welcome as these new features are, the big announcement from OnOneMap was the new feature of “Intuitive Searching” which enables users to combine search criteria to construct a sentence that instructs the service what properties to show, eg, “I want to buy a flat with up to 2 bedrooms for up to £300,000. It must be no more than 1 mile from a train station”."

I read the John Battelle book about search and Google recently (and found it really good - thoroughly recommended), and one of the striking points in this was the notion that search is a problem that's only 5% solved. Personally I'm so used to keyword searching (and comfortable with boolean search terms, exclusions etc.) that I can't imagine it working any other way... which only points at a lack of imagination on my part. If OnOneMap can actually do the stuff it's claiming reliably over a large body of data, that's a significant step forward for searching. It's a big IF IMHO - lots of folks have tried, and claimed to do, this sort of stuff before.

Then hook it up to something like Spinvox to do speech-to-text and you have natural-language interfaces to search which really make sense on mobile (after all, talking into a squawk box is way easier than poking it with your pudgy fingers).

Comments

[Philip Sheldrake]

Hi Tom,
Thanks for picking up on Sam's post, and please refer back to his post for my reply in relation to our new search interface. There was some confusion, but I believe my reply puts things straight.

We've had some super feedback on our site's feedback form, so its exciting to know we're on the right track. We'll keep attacking our product roadmap with gusto!

Best regards, Philip.

[Tom Hume]

Philip... so it's not actually natural language you're doing then. Ah, so...