Recently, we’ve been searching for a new place to live. Apart from the sky-high prices ($350.000 – $400.000 or so for 700-800ft apartments), what has come to annoy me is the lack of functionality on Norway’s leading online marketplace (where we search for apartments to look at in-person).

Norway’s leading (my assumption) online marketplace (auction-based + ad/sales driven), Finn.no, has no decent search! None!

Take a look at the real estate index page, for example, and imagine you came there looking for a specific apartment that you recall looking at a few days earlier. How do you go abouts finding it? At finn.no, you have to click your way down the hierarchy — County -> City -> Neighborhood — and manually read through tens – or possibly hundreds – of ads!

Being aware of this, you might be tempted to bookmark the individual pages so that you don’t have to go through all of this every time you search for a specific place. Errrrr. Every freakin’ finn.no page has the same title! Alas, if you bookmark multiple pages, you’ll have to manually rename each and every one of them in order to introduce some difference amongst them. Unless you enjoy visiting each one of them looking for a particular bookmark, that is.

The lack of decent titles also makes it very hard to effectively use the browser’s back-button.

I often find myself going back to the main page and clicking my way down through the hierarchy once again, simply because I’ve been visiting multiple pages (looking at ads and photos of apartments) which means that when looking in my browser’s history, there is no chance in hell (pardon the language, but finn.no did this to me) to tell two visited pages apart!

Speaking of having to go back to the index because of bad titles; if you use finn.no you’ll also experience that after browsing through the contents of a sub category, there exists no easy way back to a higher level category.

There is an option to go back to the “result set”, as they call it, which would contain the ads from the particular neighborhood, but no way to go back to, say, a city’s index, after browsing through the ads placed within a specific neighborhood. What this means, is that if you want to see the ads listed within a different neighborhood – i.e. change neighborhood view, you have to go back to the real estate index and – once again – click your way through multiple pages.

Man, does finn.no annoy me. If I could stop using it without the risk of loosing a great apartment, I’d do so instantly. I simply do not understand how a leading web site can live with such a bad information architecture…..???