HomeZilla, how do you get your data?
We are asked that question often. Unfortunately, there is no easy answer because our data comes from a wide variety of sources. Much of the data, especially non-business data, is collected in-house because no other company has taken the time to collect and geocode not-for-profit locations. We also purchase some of our data; if we can find a good and comprehensive source.
An example of how we collect data is our list of Canadian schools. This involved collecting schools for each province; which involves finding all the schools boards for the province then going to each school board’s website. Once on the site, you need to look for a list which might be in PDF or an image (we really found a list of addresses stored in an image). While it was hard to get all of the schools, our users save time because we do the hard work and make the data easy to find. For parks, it is very similar. Start with a city’s website and drill down. Most cities have a list of their park but the data isn’t user-friendly, if you want to see it on a map.
The HomeZilla’s data is on the web somewhere else (most of it) but it is very difficult/time consuming to find. Our goal is to collect all this data and make it easy to access so our users save time when researching homes.
Once and a while we find a commercial site with a list of all their store locations. We love to find data in this format. But, it does make us wonder how long before all business offer a list of their locations.
The newest type of data, and maybe the most fun, is on-map data. Usually it comes in a KML format and allows us to display shapes on our map. A couple of example are the ability to show neighbourhoods when searching in Toronto or our demograpics info when searching specific addresses in major urban areas in Canada. (ex: Calgary or Vancouver )
Drop us a line if you have more questions about our data. info [at] homezilla [ dot ] com
And of course, a big thanks to Yahoo! and Google for their geocoders.
