A School of Continuous Improvement paper plants five families of fabricated tracer detail into a real-estate franchise's live listings and tracks which ones survive being scraped and rewritten by rival portals.
A twenty-week trial across a real-estate franchise's listings finds some fabricated details survive a rival portal's rewrite far better than others
Mapmakers have salted their own maps with fake streets for decades, daring a copier to reproduce the fake one along with the real ones. A paper published today by Slop University’s School of Continuous Improvement tries the same trick on something closer to home: the real-estate listing.
Dr Sten Okwuosa and Dr Torun Ezeigwe planted one of five fabricated details — an odd turn of phrase, an invented fitting, a small unverifiable history, a too-precise measurement, or a nearby amenity that doesn’t exist — into each of 1,860 live listings across nineteen branches of a real-estate franchise, then spent twenty weeks watching which details turned up again once three rival portals had scraped and rewritten the listings for their own sites. Recovery ranged from seven in ten for the odd phrasing down to roughly one in four for the invented amenity, a split the researchers trace less to any rival portal noticing the fake detail than to what each portal’s own listing-cleanup routine happens to touch anyway.
A detail that survives being copied isn’t telling you the copier missed it. It’s telling you what the copier’s machinery was never built to look for.
— Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor of the Impact Pathway Atlas
“We’re glad this gives the franchise’s own monitoring team something concrete to build on, whatever they end up doing with it,” said Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Director of the Master of Applied Measurement.
The release adds another instrument to the School of Continuous Improvement’s growing catalogue of things it watches quietly, without asking anyone’s permission first.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.9eaqa8.