For some time now, www.zillow.com, has been a web site that realtors, sellers and consumers have used to determine the market value of their property. Until now, the property values, known as “Zestimates” were derived from public information. However, Zillow recently included a personalization features and the capability for property owners to distribute information on their property. In addition, users can track homes and save other content to a detail page of their own on the web site.

The new features are very much a way to add the human element to the results, which will effect how a property search will be displayed. This also will add valuable content to the web site which allows human interaction with the web database to provide a means to increase its search rankings in the major engines. In addition to the human added content, Zillow is further becoming a resource for the consumer by adding the functionality to map by color the price per square foot of any area in the country. This new feature can only increase the way search engines look at this resource site. It would be advantageous for any other real estate or any other comparative shopping site to follow in Zillow’s lead and bring the user into the web site building process.