Classifying my listing within a “category”

[Molly396]

Can someone please help me optimize for the new category search feature? We have a very high end unit with a chefs kitchen. It’s displayed in photographs, mentioned in descriptions and captions, and we get stellar feedback from our guests. When I go to view the new category “chef’s kitchen”, it does not come up. In fact, no listings in our city (Pittsburgh) come up. I would understand maybe if there were better more equipped “chefs kitchens” in my area.. but there are zero being advertised, and we have one! Can anyone help me get our place classified? We have another unit that is a tiny house. It’s not coming up under category “tiny house”.

I would love some guidance! 

[Molly396]

@Anonymous another question— any guess why they are investing so heavily in featuring such a select and small group of specialty properties? they’re almost all booked up anyways. 

It would seem to me this excludes so many hosts, and so many guests who do not have this flexibility… 

[Anonymous]

@Molly396  Mercifully, the conventional search methods are still available to guests whose travel plans aren't centered on Airbnb's whims. For them, the specialty stuff is just some distracting clutter on the screen. 

As a guest, my main problem with the redesign is that it's deliberately engineered to deliver search results that are completely different from what you search for.  That tries my patience; if the options I see on the first page of results are not a match for the criteria I enter, I'm not going to keep scrolling. The exact matches should always come first.

[Michael5689]

Just a note from an almost programmer that knows a fair amount about how these things get trained and algorithms depend on certain features in the models.  I've posted a screen shot of the search that I just did on my browser.  I'm also an amateur photographer and to be honest a lot of the photos I see on the front page of the "Chef's kitchen" view are actually fairly similar if you ignore the colors and just look at the structure of the photo.  I'd be willing to bet the way to try and hit the "Chef's Kitchen" algorithms sensitivities right now are:

1. Angled perspective photo with an off-center focal point/center-of-mass in the photo
2. Include island
3. Slightly elevated to look over the island so as to see as many appliances as possible
4. Refrigerator is in the photo
5. Pendant lights...DEFINITELY pendant drop lights! 🙂

I'm guessing the problem is the number of photos that AirBNB has in their training set is too small.  Over time they will supplement the training photos to give a better variation of what qualifies as a very nice kitchen.  I actually find it kind of funny that our kitchen didn't get classified as one, but I guess it's because of 4 aspects of my main kitchen shot:

1. No refrigerator and no microwave/oven/warming tray
2. At the wrong angle with a center of mass that is outside of the kitchen
3. Raised island covering the gas range
4. Too monochromatic 

I'm guessing AirBNB didn't anticipate the degree of nuance and variations in the photos.  Hopefully they'll recognize the issue and start supplementing their data sets with a wider cross section of representative photos.  ML/AI is only as good as the training set data you build it on no matter how fancy the algorithm.

Based on the above I'm almost certain I know what photo to take of our kitchen the next time I am there to "hit" that category.  My advice to others is to look at the photos when you do your own "Chef's Kitchen" search, find one that is similar to your kitchen but differs in some of the above criteria and retake it so it adds that and/or more than another criteria.

It's probably a similar story for the other categories.  If you want to get into a category, take a look at the photos that did get classified that way, try to ignore the details of the photo and just look at the overall structure (lighting, coloring, perspective, cross-section of objects in the photos, etc.) and try to replicate those aspects.

[Molly396]

@Michael5689 Thanks so much this is a super informative and helpful list. I am revamping my photos with it in mind but stopping short of adding pendant lights. Do you think the photos below are a closer representation? Still can’t see many appliances. Appreciate any feedback you got here! Thanks in advance 

 

[Michael5689]

Hard to say but if I had to guess take the picture from a spot in between where you took those two shots.  The algorithm might have trouble picking up the contrast since it’s pretty monochromatic. Maybe put a low centerpiece on the counter?

[Michael5689]

I do think the first one is better though.  Tough though because you can't see the other appliances in it...

[Dorien-and-Papito0]

We have two treehouses and none appear in the treehouse category... Other listings in the area that just have a cabin in between trees, not in a tree, do appear in Treehouses... Very confusing all of this.

[Rikke-and-Michael0]

Hi all,

I realized that the subheading of the listing (to be seen under the location name when clicking on the map or looking at the list of properties) is key to get into the categories.

Categorized listings have the name of a lake or a national park here. Then it sais "Near XXXX" under the location fo the listing. In the attached screendump it sais "Near Laguna Dulce", which is the name of a lake. It it is on the lake category!

BUT: Where does the subheading come from? 

I cannot find it anywhere in the listings or in the 'edit' part of my listing...

Any idea where this subheading comes from?

/Michael