Zillow Labs: A Place to Test New Stuff

The job of our product development team is to come up with ideas we think will be useful to you.  In our test lab, we spend a lot of time making sure things work well with various Web browsers, operating systems, etc.

Every now and then, someone writes a tool in their "spare time" (i.e. nights and weekends) that we don’t have time to fully test to make sure it integrates well with the rest of the site. So, in the spirit of playing in a tech sandbox, we came up with a way to put these ideas out there for everyone to use, test and make suggestions. It’s called Zillow Labs, and you can find it via the "labs" link at the bottom of every Zillow.com page. 

Today, we have three tools in the lab:

1) Zillow.com Search Box: Two of our developers, Jim Cooley and Jeff Lubetkin, teamed up on this tool.  They wrote code to create a Zillow search box for Web sites so anyone can type in an address and quickly get a Zestimate.  They’ve published the HTML for you to do that here.

2) Zillow Search Add-On for Firefox:  Tommy Unger, one of our data analysts, and Bryan Byrne, one of our developers, created this add-on for the popular Firefox browser.  If you haven’t checked out Firefox yet, it’s very cool — I especially like the tabbed browsing capability.  As Tommy was surfing around the net, he wanted the ability to cut and paste an address from a Web page into the search bar at the top right of the Firefox window to quickly get a Zestimate.  It’s a real time-saver for those of us who like to look up a lot of Zestimates as we surf.

3) Zillow Search Button for Google Toolbar:  Arjun Banker, one of our test developers, thought the Zillow Search Add-On for Firefox was so cool, he wanted one for Internet Explorer.  So, he came up with a search button for the Google Toolbar.  This only works in Internet Explorer for now (Google Toolbar doesn’t support custom buttons on Firefox).  You’ll need version 4 of the Google Toolbar first.  Then, visit our lab page to get our add-on button.

We also want Zillow Labs to be a way to distribute tools written by YOU, so that others who use the Zillow Web site can benefit.  If you have a tool you think folks would find interesting, please e-mail a description and link to: labs@zillow.com.  If we think it’s cool, we’ll post it. Or, if you have any feedback, please post a comment here. We hope you find the Zillow Labs useful and come back occasionally to see what else is cooking.