Google Reader Provides Integrated Property Alerts
February 24th, 2010
I use Google’s RSS Aggregator mostly when sifting through hoards of news feeds about the Spanish property market. The main advantages of any RSS aggregator are that all the information is displayed in a common format, in a single application – and is updated automatically.
Here’s an article on what RSS is, and why it’s a real time-saver.
Even though we’re currently working on improving our property email alerts at Kyero, there’s always been another way of being automatically updated about new properties.
You guessed it – via RSS.
Every property results page on Kyero.com has it’s own RSS feed. That means you can perform a property search, connect the RSS feed to your reader or aggregator programme, and sit-back and watch property updates happen automatically – and in close to real-time.
This is a great way to keep track of properties on multiple sites because you only need to watch your single RSS aggregator window – instead of visiting multiple web sites.
However, many sites don’t offer RSS feeds – even some of the ‘big portals’ don’t offer an RSS version of their search results. Now, Google Reader has a nifty feature which can help integrate even those laggards.
Just add any search results page to your Google Reader – it doesn’t have to be an RSS feed url at all. Google will:
1. Try and find an RSS feed associated with that page
2. Set up a ‘pretend’ RSS feed if it can’t find one
Google’s ‘pretend’ RSS feed is the clever bit – It essentially watches the page for changes and updates your reader when it does.
To make the most of this functionality, the portal or web site you’re looking at needs to offer the facility to sort or refine the property search by ‘list most recent properties first’ or ‘only show properties in the last 24 hours’. Hopefully, this will limit the property updates to a single web page, because Google won’t know if properties on another, subsequent search page have been updated.
There are still some archaic web practices which render Google’s innovation useless. If the web site uses frames or iframes this won’t work at all. If the site uses any technology where the page url doesn’t change to reflect the actual search parameters – then you’re sunk.
Wouldn’t it just be easier if every site offered an RSS version of its search results?
Martin Dell, Kyero.com
Related Posts
Tags
Estate agents advertise properties on Kyero to reach foreign buyers in 9 languages.
Winner of the 2008 & 2007 CNBC award for Best Property Portal Spain and 2007 Best International Property Portal, Kyero.com connects buyers and sellers of Spanish property.
Each month Kyero.com collates pricing information from thousands of properties to produce the Spanish House Price Index
- Please open a support ticket to contact us.
Your feed burner and explanation of RSS very good. I am now using it and thanks