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My biggest gripe with AirBnb is the search functionality. Sure, you are a premium product, so you can price gouge my millennial bank account all you want. But
by gregkerzhner 6y ago
My biggest gripe with AirBnb is the search functionality. Sure, you are a premium product, so you can price gouge my millennial bank account all you want. But at least give me the functionality that I need. As a software engineer, I need a place with good wifi. Hosts always claim to have wifi, but no indication of quality. Before I knew how to be a super user, it wasn't uncommon to show up to a listing that claimed to have wifi and only find out that it was coming from the building next door and you could only pick up a signal while standing up in the shower tub.
The most reliable way to find out who actually had good wifi was by searching the reviews for the term "wifi". However, AirBnb refuses to implement the ability to filter your results by terms inside review. They claim that it's because it's too technically difficult to implement this. I am no search guru, but I have fired up an Elastic Search instance to make a-one-to many relationship searchable back in my day without too many issues. I guess AirBnb's "scale" is just too awesome to to do this? I mean damn... google indexed the whole internet. You can't index your own reviews?
Then, a few months ago, I noticed that AirBnb got rid of even the search functionality on the individual listing page, so now the only way to search a listing's reviews for the word "wifi" is to go to the listing, infinite scroll the list of reviews for a few minutes to load all of them onto the page, and then use the browser's search tool.
- rickyc091 6y agoYep, I've been burned by this a few times. Now, I ask them what their internet speeds are and if there are any dead zones in the apartment.