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Tech Tips: Surf the Web Faster

January 25, 2007 · Filed under Consumer Tips, Geek Corner

As a Trulia employee who uses the site heavily, I have these expert recommendations to make your experience on Trulia–and every other web site–easier and better:

Step 1: Download Firefox. This web browser is faster than Internet Explorer or Safari, and is compatible for both Mac or PC. If you don’t have it yet, get it. You will notice a difference. The most important feature of Firefox (that has now been copied by IE) is tabbed browsing.

Step 2: Download SuperDragAndGo for Firefox. One feature of the Firefox browser is that developers all over the world constantly build little add-ons that you can install. The installations take under 10 seconds from start-to-finish (and uninstalls are just as easy). Some are useful, like this one, and some are just for fun (this one tells you how much longer George W. Bush will be in office). After installing SuperDragAndGo, you’ll be able to press your mouse over a link and drag the mouse over an inch or two to open the link in a new tab, without losing your original page. This is a super-fast way to navigate the web, and you’ll love it (a slightly slower way is to right-click and hit “open link in new tab”).

Step 3: Use our new search! I really recommend using the Heat Map search. When we first launched this product, I learned things about a place I’ve lived for 10 years, that I’d never known before. Go to your state, then zoom in on a county, and click on any of the zips to see listings there.

Step 4: Use your new technology! This is the critical part. Today’s web sites are built with so much content that one window just isn’t enough to view all of it. But who wants to constantly hit the Back button?

Take a typical search results page; say you want to look at two properties. Often what people will do is click on one property, look at it, hit the “back” button to go back to the search results page (losing your first page in the process), then they click on the second property to look at it. Then if they want to see the previous property, they hit back again…you get the point. Instead, just Drag and Go. This will let you have the Search Results Page in one tab, property A on the next tab, and property B on the next tab. Easily navigate between them just by clicking on the tabs to compare.

If you don’t like the property, just close the tab. You’ll still have your search results page sitting right there for you. If you do like it, save it to My Trulia. Or, better yet, call the listing agent, and tell them Trulia sent you!