Topic: Zillow

SEO

Zillow Direct Ads Turn Site Into Dynamic Ad Platform

Zillow has always seen itself as a media company. The real estate site, which launched in early 2006, has continued to add features and listings that are very real-estate centric. But with the introduction of its “DirectAds” program it has become something else — a site that uses its considerable data and data-mining capabilities to […]

| Oct 30, 2007 at 9:44 am ET
Content

Zillow Grabs Another Big Round Of Cash

As the Wall Street Journal reported this morning, real estate and local search site Zillow announced another round of investment — this time a whopping $30 million. That means the company has raised roughly $90 million since launching in early 2006. Among other intended uses of the money, the site will be growing its sales […]

| Sep 20, 2007 at 9:51 am ET
Ecommerce

Spock: People Search With A Man + Machine Approach

Last week, I wrote about the overall people search landscape, which, while not new, has been recently expanding and making full use of all that is shiny Web 2.0. Spock is the latest of these services to leverage social networks, intelligent web crawling, and community involvement. Spock launched in private beta in April, then in […]

| Sep 19, 2007 at 4:29 pm ET
SEO

Local Is Social By Definition

Several years ago I was having lunch in a restaurant in New York with a couple of Yahoo executives, discussing the challenge of motivating people to rate local businesses. Yahoo was way ahead of the online curve back then, although now ratings and reviews of local businesses are seemingly everywhere online. Indeed, that conversation seems […]

| Jul 16, 2007 at 9:18 am ET
SEO

Local Lessons From A Massive Launch

As reported here and elsewhere, Marchex recently launched more than 100,000 local and vertical Web sites. This involved aggregating and organizing millions of pieces of data, crafting refinements to help users pinpoint businesses, designing sites to support the variety of use cases involved in look up and discovery of local businesses, and the other couple […]

| Jul 9, 2007 at 8:48 am ET
Google

Is Google Losing Its Magic For Employees?

Today’s Wall Street Journal featured an article entitled Start-Ups Make Inroads With Google’s Work Force, which focused on emerging potential retention problems at Google (in particular vs. Facebook). Yahoo has recently shed – both voluntarily and involuntarily – a number of high profile employees and suffered negative publicity from some of those departures. Now it […]

| Jun 28, 2007 at 4:16 pm ET
Google

Vanessa Fox Leaves Google, Heads To Zillow

Google Webmaster Central product manager Vanessa Fox is heading for pastures new — jumping over to become product team lead at real estate start-up Zillow. She’ll be overseeing the development of new ad, feed and email products there. Vanessa talks about the move more on her blog, saying:

| Jun 14, 2007 at 1:21 pm ET
Ecommerce

Legal Ratings And Search Site Avvo Launches

More than a year in development, legal search and ratings site Avvo officially launched yesterday. The site allows users to search by geography and practice area or by lawyer name. It combines data from public records and (eventually) clients, community members and legal peers to offer a composite score for every attorney practicing in the […]

| Jun 6, 2007 at 12:21 pm ET
SEO

More Maps Announcements Coming This Week

The conference Where 2.0 begins tomorrow in San Jose, California. It’s about mapping, mashups and location-based services and there should be a range of interesting announcements from companies large and small. To that end, Garrett Rogers speculates, based on domain name registrations, that Google will be announcing a “street view” mapping capability at the show. […]

| May 28, 2007 at 9:18 am ET
Local

Yahoo Creates Home Values Meta Search

Zestimates from Zillow have proven to be a tremendous hit with the public, although they’ve been criticized for being too high or too low in some cases. Now Yahoo has taken Zillow’s home valuation data (they’ve had a partnership for several months) and combined it with similar data from other providers, eppraisal.com and reply.com, in […]

| May 25, 2007 at 10:43 am ET
Ecommerce

Real Estate Search Engine Trulia Redesigns, Adds Community

Real estate search site Trulia has redesigned, creating a new presentation on search results pages with more advanced property filters. But beyond this it has added “Trulia Voices,” a new community area for people to ask open-ended questions and discuss neighborhoods, schools, etc. Competitor Zillow recently also added community (Zillow Q&A), which is tied to […]

| May 11, 2007 at 12:03 pm ET
Microsoft

Yahoo’s CEO, Semel, Speaks At Microsoft’s Strategic Account Summit

Yahoo CEO arrives on Microsoft’s turf from News.com reports that Terry Semel, Yahoo’s CEO, took the podium at Microsoft’s Strategic Account Summit yesterday. Semel did not mention the recent merger rumors between Microsoft and Yahoo but did talk about working with Microsoft on creating standards for Internet advertising. Semel’s speech talked about how people are […]

| May 10, 2007 at 8:59 am ET
SEO

Zillow Adds New Community Features

Property search site Zillow is helping to lead a wave of innovation and development in the real estate vertical. This morning the site announced a range of new features including “Home Q&A,” which allows people to ask questions about properties and neighborhoods, and “EZ Ads,” which allows agents and others to create simple, CPM-based create […]

| Apr 4, 2007 at 9:32 am ET
SEO

Mobile News From CTIA And Beyond: InfoSpace, V-Enable, ZenZui

Beyond the news of Yahoo’s new mobile content and ad networks and Google’s new mobile search upgrades, there’s a good deal of mobile search-related news coming out of CTIA today. Among the announcements, InfoSpace has launched a direct-to-consumer version of its mobile local-search application Find It! for Blackberry devices. Previously the company was working exclusively […]

| Mar 27, 2007 at 4:02 pm ET