Friday Help Desk: How Do I Enable Radius Search?

Posted on January 27, 2012

Once a week on Friday’s, I’m going to take one (or some) of  your most pressing questions about IDX, web analytics, landing pages (and the like), and answer them right here on the blog. Let’s call this the Friday Help Desk Series (that sounds good). If you want to be featured next week, drop a comment on our Facebook Page or if you want to remain anonymous, email me: [email protected] with “Help Desk” as the subject line. No question is to big, or too small. So hit me with it!

This week, several of you have asked:

“How do I use the radius search or polygon feature on my account?”

Radius Search and Custom Polygon Links are two new features that we enabled in dsSearchAgent v3.3 released earlier this week.

To enable Radius Search, you’ll need to perform the following steps:

  1. Log into your dsControlPanel,
  2. Hover over IDX Products ==> Click on “Options” ==> Click on the “Search” Tab

Once there, you’ll want to click and drag “Radius” out of the disabled panels section and into your active panels section. See here:

You’ll want to repeat this of course for any custom links that you create if you want to enable Radius Search on those custom links/maps as well.

Now, as for the custom polygon links… Just to be clear, this feature is accessible to you in order to create a search around a specific area like say around specific tracts, neighborhoods, water-front properties, et cetera.

This was intended to provide you with an easier way to create custom links around very specific borders and parameters. Consumers however, won’t be able to draw, create and search by polygons on the front-end.

Now, let’s look at how to create a custom polygon link, shall we? You’ll need to perform the following steps:

  1. Log into your dsControlPanel,
  2. Hover over IDX Products ==> Click on “Links”
  3. On the right-hand side, there’s a little icon to “create a new link” – click on that.

From there, you’ll proceed to create your custom link like you would any other custom link. But right below the “map starting point,” you’ll see another map right below it that reads “Custom Polygon” – and that’s where you draw and create your new polygon to filter search results by polygon. See here:

And there you have it… You’ve just successfully enabled search by radius on your new IDX map search AND you’ve created custom polygon links for your niche community pages. All you have to do now is share your new IDX search features with your clients ;-)

Here are two examples of Agents who have blogged about the new search features on their websites to share with their site visitors:

Have you introduced the new features to your site visitors in any way? What do you think so far?