You Now Have the Ability to Add Free School Data to Your Web Site or Blog
September 11, 2008
By: Drew Meyers
Author's Website: http://www.zillow.com
The chances are very good that if there is an interesting data set out there that is unavailable without licensing costs, someone is going to make it available to be syndicated for free. Today, access to one of those compelling data sets very relevant to the real estate industry — school data — just became free. With school district quality being one of the biggest factors to determining where to move, it’s no real secret that home buyers are interested in researching schools. Education.com has a brand new API that will allow any web site to integrate a vast array of school data to your real estate web site. There is also a map-based schoolfinder widget for the bloggers or for those who want a more light weight integration.
My employer, Zillow.com, is the launch partner for their API and I was involved on the business side to getting Education.com school data integrated onto Zillow. Some examples are the pages for Skyline High School (my high school), Spiritridge Elementary (one of the elementary schools I attended), and the Bellevue School District. The team over at Education.com has been absolutely fantastic to work with over the past few months (I first met Sean, their VP of biz dev, while at Inman in NYC) — I can definitely vouch for their commitment to this initiative and their willingness to resolve software problems that come up.
On to the specifics — their school data, which is above and beyond the NCES data set, is comprehensive with coverage for over 125,000 schools nationwide. Here are the high level categories of available data:
- School profiles
- Test scores
- Student and teacher statistics
- Parent reviews and ratings
There are two ways to get school data from Education.com onto your blog or web site — an API (which you can sign up for here) or their SchoolFinder Widget. For the bloggers out there, the widget is probably the way to go, at least until a PHP developer codes up a cool wordpress plugin using their API. If you are a real estate technology provider (Diverse Solutions, RealBird, Agent Image, Postlets etc) or a real estate brokerage (Better Homes & Garden, Redfin, Rubloff, etc) with a technical team to integrate data via an API and are looking to add school data to your data arsenal, I’d definitely take a look at the new Education.com School Finder API. Their data is included in the list of free local data resources on Zillow.
Oh yeah — did I mention it’s all FREE?
Lastly, I know launching and running an API program is no small feat since Zillow runs a similar program that provides access to home valuations, listings, local real estate information, and (coming soon) mortgage rates — congratulations to the Education.com team for getting it out the door!
- Stumble it!
- Categories: API's, Websites, Widgets
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Comments
29 Comments so far
RealBird on September 11, 2008 8:15 pm
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 on September 11, 2008 8:20 pm
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 on September 11, 2008 9:30 pm
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 on September 12, 2008 10:07 am
Bob-
What city/zip are you looking at? What specific data are you wanting them to include inside the widget?
Bob Schenkenberger on September 12, 2008 11:26 am
Drew, zip 80111 doesn’t pull nearly all the schools.
Bob Schenkenberger on September 12, 2008 11:29 am
The City, State function does better, but still is incomplete.
Seann Birkelund on September 12, 2008 12:11 pm
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 on September 12, 2008 12:26 pm
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 on September 12, 2008 2:54 pm
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 on September 12, 2008 5:51 pm
Wow, great find. This is something we’ve been wanting but didn’t want to pay for.
Carolyn Gjerde-Tu on September 12, 2008 8:18 pm
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 on September 14, 2008 1:43 pm
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 on September 14, 2008 2:25 pm
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.
Consistent Clients - Real Estate Marketing » Blog Archive » Weekend Web 2.0 Wrap-Up for 9/14 on September 15, 2008 5:15 am
[...] to Geek Estate Blog, Education.com is now providing a free, customizable widget with school data from over 125,000 [...]
Seann Birkelund on September 15, 2008 11:57 am
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 on September 15, 2008 12:02 pm
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 on September 15, 2008 1:07 pm
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 on September 15, 2008 1:36 pm
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;)
Carnival of Real Estate… and the winner is. | RE Blog World Blog on September 15, 2008 4:10 pm
[...] mention to Drew Meyers for his Geek Estate post ‘You Now Have the Ability to Add Free School Data to Your Web Site or Blog’. Helping the readership build better blogs by alerting them to new features is a great strategy. [...]
Carnival of Real Estate #108 | Zillow® Blog on September 15, 2008 5:13 pm
[...] proud to say that third place went to Zillow’s Drew Meyers for his Geek Estate post, “You Now Have the Ability to Add Free School Data to YOur Web Site or Blog”. Head on over and check it [...]
Tony on September 16, 2008 6:03 am
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 on September 16, 2008 6:22 am
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 on September 16, 2008 10:24 am
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 on September 16, 2008 11:10 am
Seann
Appreciate the note and the call to help me to better understand.
Tony
Chad Huck on September 16, 2008 6:10 pm
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 on September 17, 2008 12:14 pm
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
blog.mattgoyer.com » links for 2008-09-25 on September 25, 2008 2:09 pm
[...] You Now Have the Ability to Add Free School Data to Your Web Site or Blog | GeekEstate Blog (tags: realestate) September 25th 2008 Posted to Links [...]
Free Data for Your Real Estate Web Site | GeekEstate Blog on November 14, 2008 10:34 am
[...] Education.com Schoolfinder API - For an overview of the available data, take a look at my Geek Estate post back in September when Education.com released their API. [...]
Real Estate and Property » Blog Archive » Free Data Sources for Your Real Estate Web Site on November 16, 2008 4:33 am
[...] Education.com Schoolfinder API - For an overview of the available data, take a look at my Geek Estate post back in September when Education.com released their API. [...]