Case Study: Rightmove achieves improved customer experience through geo capabilities with Elastic

Improving Customer Experience with Geo Capabilities at the UK’s Biggest Property Portal

Rightmove, the UK’s largest property portal (about 55 million visits a day, 1.2 million properties, and over 90% of UK estate agents), faced a painful legacy search platform that didn’t scale, required nightly re-indexing, and lacked geo-capabilities and developer agility. At the same time they needed to support 50+ microservices, handle massive logging (7.3 billion log messages/day) and deliver location-aware features and user alerts at scale.

They migrated to Elasticsearch and a microservices architecture, implementing geo-distance, geo-polygon/shape and bounding-box searches for map, draw and point-based queries, and using percolators to run reverse-search alerts against ~3.5M saved searches (driving ~2.5M alert emails/day and ~1B percolate queries/week). Combined with the Elastic Stack for centralized logging and monitoring, this delivered faster indexing, scalable geo-search and alerts, improved observability for developers, and new products like the “Where Can I Live?” travel-time search.

Rightmove

Adrian McMichael

Lead Application Architect