Let’s talk about power search. Redfin currently offers over thirty ways to filter your search, but it seems that no matter how many options we provide, there will always be someone out there who wants more. Here’s a sampling of the kinds of emails we regularly receive in our Tech Support inbox: “I would like… Read More
(This post assumes you have some familiarity with Google Spreadsheets) For CSV files that are unprotected, Google Spreadsheets provides a really handy function: importData(url). There’s a short description of it in the list of Google Spreadsheet functions. If you just use this lovely function in cell A1 and pass it the URL of a CSV file, you’ll… Read More
For many years, Redfin has used Postgres for storing all of the data that backs the main redfin.com site. Until early this year, we were running on Postgres 8.4, but as the the Postgres folks continued to add exciting features to the 9.x line, we became more and more eager to make the jump. First,… Read More
In the months leading to the launch of Redfin Open Book, we embarked in an ambitious data cleanup project. We had 7,500+ free-form text fields from which we needed to extract structured vendor information. We ended up with 3,000+ cleaned database records. In this post I’ll walk you through how we used MTurk, and share the lessons I learned from using it. Read More