#IT Business Blogs RSS Feed IT Business Blogs Atom Feed IT Business Blogs » How I Googled my apartment hunt Comments Feed IT Business Blogs Preparing today’s students for a tech-driven future On-premise vs. Cloud – the market is shifting How to Out-Secure the Competition in 5 Easy Steps IT Business Blogs Business Advantage through Technology RSS Feeds Follow me on Twitter! * Home * About * IT Business.ca « On-premise vs. Cloud – the market is shifting How to Out-Secure the Competition in 5 Easy Steps » How I Googled my apartment hunt When I found myself hunting for an apartment for the third time in 18 months, an uncomfortable feeling of weariness started to seep into my bones. Brian Jackson, journalist Brian Jackson Looking for a place to live is daunting in a place like Toronto, where the competition amongst renters is fierce. One must avoid slum lords, master a knowledge of tenant rights, make cold calls, and prepare to hand over more personal information than your mother knows about you to a complete stranger. But instead of succumbing to apartment hunt exhaustion, I decided to give it a Web 2.0 punch and make finding the perfect place to live nearly automatic. When you need to find nearly anything these days, you turn to Google. So it’s no surprise I employed this search giant’s myriad services to help find a new apartment. Take Google Reader and add several custom, search-based RSS feeds, a shared Google Document, and a Google Maps mash-up on the side – you’ve got a perfect recipe for a successful apartment hunt. I started by hitting Craigslist and conducting a search for an apartment in the area I wanted. Most people know they can type in a neighbourhood or street name to filter down the results, but few know you can combine these searches into one feed. Say you want to see all apartments listed along one specific street, and also all apartments described as being located in a neighbourhood. Just type both names into the search, separated by a | so it looks like this: “street|neighbourhood” and then fill out the fields for rent, bedrooms, and hit search. You’ll get a tailored list of results. craigslist search Search multiple terms at once by separating words with |. Now scroll all the way to the bottom of your search and find the orange “RSS” button. Click it and add the feed to your Google Reader. Next, I padded my results by adding similar search-based feed from Kijiji. This free online classifieds service also allowed me to search by key word with several filters applied such as number of bedrooms and price range. But I couldn’t find a way to include multiple search terms at once, like I could do in Craigslist. Instead, I did three separate searches for the three areas I wanted to find an apartment in, and saved each RSS feed to my Google Reader. Kijiji filters Hone in on your target using filters. In Google Reader, I created a folder named “Apartments” and put my four new RSS feeds into this folder. Now clicking on this one folder gives me the up-to-date listings of all the apartments in the area I’m interested in, in my price range. My search just got a lot easier. My roommate and I shared a Google Document to highlight apartments we were interested in viewing. We’d share a link to the online listing and write down a few details about the apartment, and the landlord’s name and contact. We’d write down times we scheduled viewings for and then rate the apartments if only one of us could attend the showing. This tool helped us avoid calling the same landlord twice, and helped us fit apartment viewings into our busy schedules. Finally, I used Zoocasa to search for an apartment by neighbourhood. Or if I wasn’t sure what neighbourhood an apartment belonged too, I could type in the address to get the result. Zoocasa maps out neighbourhoods on a Google Map with clear boundaries. Zoocasa Thanks to these helpful Web-based tools, I didn’t have to find my new apartment. It found me. Tags: apartment, Google, search, Web 2.0 Share this post! * Twitter * Digg * Facebook * Delicious * StumbleUpon * Google Bookmarks * LinkedIn * Yahoo Bookmarks * Technorati Favorites This entry was posted by Brian Jackson on July 23, 2010 at 6:00 am, and is filled under Tutorials. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. Find more at: IT Business.ca * Related Posts * Comments (2) * #1 written by Karl Taylor July 24, 2010 - 10:36 am Quote This is the ease of dot com age. * #2 written by Tina November 29, 2011 - 3:39 pm Quote This is awesome info! I’ve been doing my apartment searching the easy way, using this site. But its really great to know that about the craigslist “combine” search! That will come in handy for so many things. Thanks. Cancel Reply Name (required)_________________________ E-mail (required, will not be published) Website_________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ Submit Comment No trackbacks yet. OLED, Smart and 3D TVs prominent at CES 2012 January 11, 2012 - 5:35 am Tags: 3, 3D, Canada, celebrities, CES 2012, Cinema 3D, Consumer Electronics Show, Google, Jeffrey Ingram, Justin Timberlake, Las Vegas, LG, Men in Black, OLED, Samsung, smart appliances, Smart TVs, Sony, Super OLED, Will Smith Posted in Leadership | No comments Put simply, OLED provides faster picture quality for moving resolution that is one thousand times faster than a LED panel. The output is amazing, best-in-class picture quality. Companies exposing Canadians’ personal information face no penalty December 9, 2011 - 7:16 am Tags: advertising, behavioural, breach, buzz, data, Facebook, Google, Jennifer Stoddart, online, opinion, personal information, privacy, Privacy Commissioner of Canada, StreetView, tracking Posted in Opinion, Privacy and Security | 2 comments This week, it once again looks like Facebook will once again escape penalty for breaching user privacy as a class-action lawsuit representing Canadian members of the social network is halted in its tracks with a settlement agreement. To escape any liability for changing its default privacy settings to expose more user information around the beginning of 2010, Facebook only had to agree to pay a paltry $76,000 and commit to keeping its current privacy policy “substantially the same” for three years. Driving steady organic growth on a shoestring November 23, 2011 - 12:46 am Tags: AdWords, bootstrap, Europas, Future 50, Google, LinkedIn, marketing, media list, media outreach, organic growth, PR, productivity, project management, public relations, retargeting, SaaS, Silicon Roundabout, Silicon Valley, Smarta100, software-as-a-service, startup, Teamly Posted in Managing Business | No comments Teamly is a two-year-old startup which has brought to market an innovative productivity and project management tool which it delivers through a Software-as-a-Service (Saas) model. What Google’s Eric Schmidt thinks of other tech CEOs September 7, 2011 - 7:47 am Tags: ceo, eric schmidt, Facebook, Google, marc benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft, Salesforce, steve ballmer, steve jobs Posted in Leadership, Opinion | 2 comments When it came to Apple’s recently departed CEO Steve Jobs, Schmidt wasn’t shy about giving compliments. Privacy concerns with Google + September 1, 2011 - 6:00 am Tags: cloud computing, Google, Internet, Internet-based services, ITB, ITWC, privacy, security, SMB, social media, social networks Posted in Privacy and Security | 4 comments There are two main concerns I had regarding Google+ privacy–granting permissions in Google+ Games, and the broad scope of the terms of service (ToS) required just to use Google+. Google+ the ‘Swiss Army Knife’ of social networks July 27, 2011 - 8:07 am Tags: broadcast, Facebook, follow, Google, social network, Twitter Posted in Managing Business | 5 comments As Google+ expands, though, I wonder if people will know what to make of this Swiss Army Knife of social networks. After all, what killed Google Wave wasn’t that it did too little, it was that it did too much. It was an email system, a chat network, a file sharing service, a project management device and more — it did so much that people couldn’t figure out how to use it. OMG! There’s an entrepreneur on campus July 11, 2011 - 6:00 am Tags: Andrew Fisher, Band of Angels, campus culture, commercialization, education, entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, innovation, ITB, ITWC, Ken Banks, Kiwanja, Mark Zuckerberg, MIT, post-secondary, Ronald Weissman, sales, SMB, Stanford, technology transfer, university, Web 2.0, Wesley Clover Posted in Privacy and Security | No comments Too many universities fail to appreciate how Web 2.0 has democratized innovation for the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world and make the mistake of assuming it is only engineers or physics students who can come up with the next billion-dollar idea. Users lose in Facebook’s smear campaign against Google May 13, 2011 - 7:58 am Tags: blogger, Burson-Marstellar, Facebook, Google, PR, privacy, smear, user information Posted in Opinion | No comments As with previous scuffles between the two companies, this incident was all about user data, and who gets to control it. Facebook doesn’t like how Google scrapes public Facebook data for its own social search results, and therefore claimed that the data was being used improperly. Google is looking into that allegation. Give Canada’s Privacy Commissioner the teeth it deserves May 6, 2011 - 8:00 am Tags: Canadians, data breach, Facebook, Google, personal information, playstation network, privacy commissioner, watch dog Posted in Leadership, Opinion | 1 comment In an Internet culture where more than half of Canadians are using Facebook (which has a spotty privacy record at best) and even more use Google services, Canada needs a strong regulator to protect the privacy of its citizens. A recent class-action lawsuit launched by a Toronto law firm against Sony for its PlayStation Network breach, and another one launched last year on behalf of Canadians against Facebook, shows that the legal system is already trying to compensate for the gaps in Canada’s privacy enforcement. The media tablet ecosystem race March 26, 2011 - 6:00 am Tags: Android, Apple, ARM, eReader, Galaxy Tab, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Honeycomb, IDC, iOS, iPad, Kindle, media tablet, Microsoft Windows, mobile computing, Samsung, smartphone, tablet, tablet PC, Xoom Posted in Privacy and Security | No comments Give the human race 20 years and the laptops we all lug around will seem as ancient as the clay tablets the Assyrians used to record cuneiform lists of goats, gold and slaves. * Search______________ Submit * + Recent comments + Popular posts + Archives + Tags + Categories + Leadership (124) + Managing Business (163) + Mobility (97) + Opinion (84) + Privacy and Security (134) + Tutorials (21) Apple BlackBerry branding business cell phones cloud computing commercialization data theft e-commerce education entrepreneur Entrepreneurship Facebook Google government hackers hardware Internet iPad iPhone ITB ITWC legislation malware managing business marketing mobile devices Mobility privacy privacy issues RIM security Small Business smartphone smartphones SMB SMBs social media social networking software spam startup technology Twitter venture capital + February 2012 (3) + January 2012 (25) + December 2011 (18) + November 2011 (23) + October 2011 (22) + September 2011 (21) + August 2011 (23) + July 2011 (20) + June 2011 (22) + May 2011 (22) + April 2011 (22) + March 2011 (25) + February 2011 (18) + January 2011 (20) + December 2010 (18) + November 2010 (19) + October 2010 (14) + September 2010 (13) + August 2010 (11) + July 2010 (13) + June 2010 (11) + May 2010 (16) + April 2010 (13) + March 2010 (12) + February 2010 (8) + January 2010 (19) + December 2009 (14) + 4 tips on making it big on eBay (50) + QR Code Security - Are we ready to discuss the risks? 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