Fennel Funnel

Let me start off by saying that Google is a magnificent company making some quite magnificent things, not least a magnificent amount of money. But there's one thing Google can't do when you type a keyword in, and that is to magically create a site that links together all the pertinent information you're looking for. When my grandfather died my father looked up "Septic shock" on Google and had to trawl through several sites (of which two or three were things like "Cure your Septic Shock today! ____ brand medicine") and now that I'm thinking of moving I'm trawling through the many, many sites advertising places to rent in Singapore, which obviously doesn't include the forums and agents and things like that.

So here's a proposal from me to whomever is a website designer in Singapore who wants to make renting better.

First off, of course, it should be free to join, post ads, etc. But ads should follow a certain format--enter address, description of facilities (this could follow a checklist of the usual amenities with an Others: ______), and obviously rental rates and contact information (or the contact information of the agent), and it should be searchable by Google or have an Arrange By ___ function on the search results page itself, plus Google Maps plugins and various other makes-life-easy things. But to be properly great, the ad would only be taken down when the ad-creator took it down by stating that the room was now occupied or otherwise no longer available for rent (the site would of course automatically email every now and then to say how many people had viewed the ad, how to make the ad more appealing, etc.). And then the information would be saved--so that, for example, should that same address become again available for rent, the new ad would contain also the information "This address was rented on DD/MM/YYYY by PREVIOUS AD PLACER", repeated as many times as the address has been available for rent--so a place where, say, people move in and get out after one month and the house-owner keeps putting the place back up for rent would have an ad about a mile long showing what the tenant turnover is like, and conversely a place where the tenants never ever left would have a shorter ad.

The other part of the site could be a reviews bit, which would follow the same format: enter the address of the place, description of amenities, and contact information--or, to preserve privacy, an option for PMing--and then people would be able to state what they thought about the place, with pictures if possible. And of course if the address being reviewed coincided with the address on an ad, then the review would come up in the ad too and therefore ensure complete and total information, especially since people are about 11 times as likely to complain as they are to commend and cameraphones are everywhere. Obviously these reviews are likely to be faked or written by ad placers or dummies, which is why the site will also need to incorporate IP-checking, a review-voting system, and prevent ad placers from writing reviews about the place being advertised (and prevent reviewers from placing ads) for a certain number of weeks.

And if it all worked and got enough people on it, then one would probably wind up with a massive site or map where all the important information on the housing/rental market in any given place was there to be Google-searched at any time and compiled and compared (that'd be nice on an ad, too, a button going Compare this Ad to Nearby Available Properties! or an addon to Google Maps that showed available properties within an area) and I think the rental market would be much nicer, especially if house-owners had just as many tabs on the competition and realised they were under scrutiny themselves.

Yes, information is indeed beautiful and I never get enough of it. (I blame being under-informed for a great deal in my life really.)