DISQUS

RealBird · 1 year ago

Drew - Thanks for the heads up. Perfect. I wanted to have access to an API for high quality school data for so long. I am checking it out right now.

-- Zoltan

Bob Schenkenberger · 1 year ago

Great idea, but the school list isn't accurate. It only shows partial lists when searching by zip or city & state. All schools come up by district, but frustrating when all the data you expect doesn't show up on the map. I would like this for my blog, but wont use it until complete data is shown.

Dave Blockhus · 1 year ago

Drew- Like the concept, but hate the 8 second commercial users are hit with when they try to get the school info. It took a few clicks to bypass it. I also don't like all the ads on the sidebars, but I guess they have to make money providing the free service. Not sure if I'm ready to use it yet.

Drew Meyers · 1 year ago

Bob-
What city/zip are you looking at? What specific data are you wanting them to include inside the widget?

Bob Schenkenberger · 1 year ago

Drew, zip 80111 doesn't pull nearly all the schools.

Bob Schenkenberger · 1 year ago

The City, State function does better, but still is incomplete.

Seann Birkelund · 1 year ago

Drew, thanks for the great post. We're really excited about having the opportunity to broadly disseminate school information and to provide valuable tools to real estate professionals. Bob, I appreciate your thoughts on the widget. The two issues you raise are a result of filtering algorithms within our code that are designed to ensure the highest level of accuracy and a good visual design. For the widget, we initial limited the number of schools that would be delivered for any location to prevent a map that looks like a pin cushion. Based on your comments, we are removing this filter and you should be able to get a complete list for any location by the end of today. On the second issue, in some locations not all schools in the area are mapped on the map because we have a location quality score for all our latitude and longitude values. If our systems detect that the recorded latitude/longitude for a specific school may be incorrect, it removes the listing from the map. We're going to work hard to fix this one in the near term as well.

Seann Birkelund · 1 year ago

Dave, I appreciate your comments as well. As you note, we are a media company, so ads are the way we keep the lights on around here. We are, however, highly sensitive to how our users view the ads we place on our site and take criticism to heart. The interstitial you came across when visiting our site is supposed to have a significant frequency cap and be designed to be as tasteful as possible. Sounds like we need to re-visit this. Hopefully, you can get past your initial experience and there is an opportunity for us to work together going forward. Keep the comments coming and feel free to reach out to me directly or to api-support(at)education.com. Thanks!

Jeff in Hawaii · 1 year ago

Hey Drew – Education.com seems to be a great solution for agents that are interested in getting school data for free. Thanks for sharing!

Interesting to watch the big companies to see how they are getting very creative with the widgets and stuffing them with keyword links. Trulia has been doing that for a while. I remember reading that people in the SEO world were referring to it as widget spam.

Justin on Honolulu · 1 year ago

Wow, great find. This is something we've been wanting but didn't want to pay for.

Carolyn Gjerde-Tu · 1 year ago

I like the concept of having school information easily available but would like to see the api score show up before the detailed information. Also look the domain name education.com

Judy Peterson · 1 year ago

This is a really good concept. I love the Widget idea. But it seems like it would have been more logical to design the pick by School Districts than zip codes. The post office scatters zip codes across multiple school districts in my area.

Jay Thompson · 1 year ago

I installed the blog in my "widget test area". Easy enough. Quickly found there is no evidence of a newish school (about 1.5 years) nearby. Makes me wonder what schools are missing that I don't know about.

I agree with Judy's comment. I would LOVE to be able to have a school district search/widget as generally we get inquiries based on district, not city or zip.

Seann Birkelund · 1 year ago

Judy, the search by school district functionality is a great idea. We will definitely look to incorporate this functionality going forward. One of the reasons its not in the first release is there is additional complexity around the user experience and design. For instance, not all school districts cover K-12, so to get all the schools in the area, you would actually need to enable users to select multiple school districts. We also thought about this with respect to neighboring zip codes. Thanks for the feedback.

Seann Birkelund · 1 year ago

Jay, without knowing the specific area/school you are looking at, I would speculate that the school in questions was not reported in Arizona's 2007 standardized test results. We cover all the schools within a state, so long as they are captured in the test results released by that state's department of education. Arizona released its 2008 test results in August. The new information from Arizona will be live on our site shortly. Thanks for your comments.

Justin in Honolulu · 1 year ago

Just so you know, I went and signed up and the process was very easy. Now I have my Web Service API key and I'm ready to go.

Hawaii real estate company · 1 year ago

Seann - This looks like it could bring a lot of value to real estate companies website. Is to pretty easy to add to the site and what level programming skills would one need to have to add it to the site. At first glance it looks great. Not sure if the consumer will appreciate the pop up ad they have to click through to get the data. Might be better to eliminate that. Thanks for sharing this hopefully useful tool;)

Tony · 1 year ago

The statement, "Oh yeah — did I mention it’s all FREE?", is more than a bit misleading with respect to the API.

It's a crippled free trial - 100 API calls a day for just a 2 month period. That isnt "all free" by any means and even the most lightly visited real estate sites will run up against the 100 call limit on some days.

Great concept but you should label it for what it is.

Tony

ethnicomm · 1 year ago

Great application. For one of the companies I consulted with, we had a discrete one-liner at the bottom that served as our "advertising". I can appreciate the need for a revenue stream - how about making it a part of the widget (dynamic of course) and NOT having it pop up. You ensure your advertisers that it gets seen and you don't annoy viewers because they know it's there. Just like all the google adwords I see on realtor's sites :)

Seann Birkelund · 1 year ago

Tony, thanks for requesting the API. The usage limits are really just designed for testing purposes and to ensure we get to know the companies that are using our data before they go live. When you are ready to take your testing to the next level, drop us a line and we will be more than happy to remove the limits. The API is in fact free. There is no upgrade path where we charge for a more fully functional version, a company just has to ask. Thanks.

Tony · 1 year ago

Seann

Appreciate the note and the call to help me to better understand.

Tony

Chad Huck · 1 year ago

I'm impressed with this widget and have added it to Road to Real Estate: A Charlotte and Lake Norman Area Blog. But I'm even more impressed with Seann following up with some complaints/suggestions about this widget/program/website/etc. It just shows that he cares about what people are saying about his product and has already changed it due to some complaints/suggestions. Way to go Seann. Way to protect your brand identity and show that you are open to feedback.

Robert Darrow · 1 year ago

Loved the widget. Added it based on your recommendation. But the more popular it got, the slower it became. A couple days ago, load times at my blog increased to ten seconds. Deleted the school widget and went right back to instant loads. Sorry the server can't handle the traffic :(

Jennifer in Louisville · 1 year ago

Looks nifty, but I've never messed with trying to install anything like that. Any ideas on how difficult it would be to get that placed in something like a Wordpress blog? Easy? Impossible? Somewhere in between?

Seann Birkelund · 1 year ago

Jennifer, we have support for wordpress plugins built in. If you are familiar with how to add a plugin to your Wordpress blog, it should be pretty simple. Go to www.education.com/schoolfinder/tools/localschoo..., customize your widget and then click on "Download Wordpress Plugin." This will download two files for you - one a text file with instructions and the other the plugin itself. Let us know hoe it goes and drop us a line at api-support[at]education.com if you run in to any snags.