Using online classifieds for local search, specifically, to rent a home in Utah

A couple of quick things I learned about renting a home in Utah.

1. As KSL lists the most recent ads first, don’t renew your ad after 30 days- take the few minutes to delete it and create a new one.


2. The search engine does not proactively isolate queries to categories. For example, a search for “home rental” includes an ad for carpet whose description says “would be wonderful for your home or your rental property”.


3. In classifieds, especially homes, locality is everything. It seems that this local search uses not only the description text, or even the physical address (which is truncated in the listing) but possibly another hidden field, like the seller’s address. My experiment was to search for “lehi home”. Most listings matched lehi in the location field, but somebody smart included names of surrounding locations in their ad descriptions. One listing didn’t match my location on any visible text. Another possible explanation is that this listing meet the “home” part of the query only.


4. This search engine is smart enough to handle permutations- For example- the query “rental home” does include my listing, although only the word “rent” is found in the title of the listing. Again, list is sorted by recency, not relevance, so my listing trumps those with the word rental.