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Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

carsabi.com

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Re: Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

#62

Post by gleb »

Very nice. Used it to research upcoming purchase quickly, would have signed up to persist saved results if you had that option.

Main feedback - browser refresh, back/forward, tabs, middle-click should work, e.g.

- refresh now loses half the state (why half?)

- opening 'Click to view listing' messes up state (loses saved)

- want to be able to middle click on 'Details' to open in new tab

Nice to have: integration with Edmunds to appraise the car

Re: Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

#63

Post by ajx »

wrapping a business model around a the availability of a third party is a doomed to fail idea. Craigslist specifically is probably the worst offender on the internet right now regarding sharing functionality on their site. They spend millions of dollars per year on anti-spam and code to prevent users from using their web site. This being said, it will only be a matter of days or weeks before your code needs to be retooled to using proxy networks because your netblocks are all firewalled (this happens automatically).... So, anyway, good luck, you're going to need it.

Re: Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

#64

Post by lambtron »

Very useful. When I bought my Honda '92 on Craigslist, I was optimizing for cost and therefore spent a few weeks just feeling out the price range for model, mileage, and title (I was only looking at clean titles). It seems that the search settings here do a good job covering what my primary focus was.

In order to jump on the hottest deals, I would set up an IFTTT condition to email me when new queries were posted on Craigslist. Would be cool to have some monitoring with this site.

Regardless, very nice work!

Re: Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

#66

Post by dw5ight »

sktrdie wrote: post #59

Very cool. What's the software stack behind this? How are you performing searches across all this very diverse data? For example, you must be doing some sort of text-analysis to retrieve the mileage property out of the text, no?

Craigslist is a ton of NLP to figure out common ways to phrase mileage etc... also catch all the mispellings.

We're also experimenting with some structured parsing for the universal dealership parser we alluded to - this means trying to figure out which part of the page has a listing so we dont accidentally report the mileage from a warranty or similar listings lower down the page... turns out to be a fairly tricky problem but its also a ton of fun to work on! Will keep you posted if we start having a ton of success automagically crawling the interweb. Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

#67

Post by dw5ight »

gleb wrote: post #62

Very nice. Used it to research upcoming purchase quickly, would have signed up to persist saved results if you had that option. Main feedback - browser refresh, back/forward, tabs, middle-click should work, e.g. - refresh now loses half the state (why half?) - opening 'Click to view listing' messes up state (loses saved) - want to be able to middle click on 'Details' to open in new tab Nice to have: integration with…

1. Yeah, pretty much everybody today told us to make tabs work. Going to add for sure 2. Hadn't thought of saving searches (not listings) yet, great idea 3. Damn! My js skills suck, will debug 3. I'll check with Edmunds if they have an API, that could be cool. In the mean time we were going to add some stats about how any car compares to others nationally with the same model, year, and mileage

thanks!

Re: Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

#69

Post by michaelschade »

Love it, the interface is great.

I'd like to see query parameters stored in the URL instead. As others have mentioned, it'd be nice to be able to bookmark pages and you currently can't. In addition to the bookmarking use case, I'd want to be able to email links to the results (e.g., so my dad could check them out).

It was also initially confusing to return to the homepage to find my past query, not the search form. Even if you don't get around to embedding search parameters in URL right away, consider adding a clear button to erase all of my input and let me start fresh.

More of a nitpick, but when I made a typo on my zip code on the main page and hit submit, it also erased my entry for the search box. The form data should be persisted even if there is an error, and the problem input should be highlighted in red or something.

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