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Show HN: Crawling car dealerships for a real time consumer search engine

demanjo.com

61–66 of 66 posts

Re: Show HN: Crawling car dealerships for a real time consumer search engine

#61
Overall, impressive data, but UI/UX could be improved.

'Refine By' menu shows an arrow on mouseover, but user can only click on words, not arrow or high-lighted area.

'Refine By' pop-out menus show a square, value as hyperlink, count. Square looks like a checkbox (with rounded corners) but clicking on square produces no result (this user expected a checkbox response, & ability to select multiple models, colors, etc.)

Change of other filters does not require a 'go' button, but change of search radius does.

Results appear to have a wide radius, but pull-down for location does not show what default/pre-selected radius is (by experimentation, 10 miles).

Generally, the user should be able to tell what filters are currently active, and what their values are.

Clear Price filter action appeared to clear all filters.

US states and placenames with multi-word names should have all elements capitalized: s/New mexico/New Mexico/ s/San luis obispo/San Luis Obispo/

Price filter should allow either end-point to be absent.

Mileage should allow arbitrary range end-points, like price.

Year should allow a range, or checkboxes.

Consider having Refine by Make hide the less popular makes behind a 'more' button. So, by default display top N makes & 'more', 'more' displays top N2 (or all) makes & 'more', top N4 or all, top N*8 or all, etc. (otherwise the menu may grow to many dozens of obscure makes)

Support 'open in a new tab' on the hyperlinks show below the first search box. Searching displayed 3 links with counts, but displays nothing - sigh. (perhaps the back-end function is not yet implemented?)

Again, impressive data.

Re: Show HN: Crawling car dealerships for a real time consumer search engine

#62
post #60
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trucks are certainly the most difficult to decode. But if you are using something like ChromeData for the VIN data, and combine that with the info from the dealer's site then you can usually narrow the vehicle down to a specific trim level. Not always however. Dealers frequently have incorrect or missing information on their websites, so garbage-in, garbage out. This is why scraping dealer websites for data is always…

I used to work for a competitor in the same space as AutoRevo =) Chrome was ok, but there was another provider that had exact vin matches in their catalog. It was a bit more expensive, but made it so the trim field was a non-issue. I don't remember the name, it's been too long.

It might have been AutoData, but they have merged with Chrome. Edmunds has a decoder, but it's pretty laughable. I'm not aware of any other major players in that field outside of those.

Chrome offers 1-1 matches on VIN to style Ids for most OEM's, but it's an additional cost.

Re: Show HN: Crawling car dealerships for a real time consumer search engine

#63
post #48

Great job. Love the idea. Can you tell us which technologies you used ?

Everything is proprietary!! that is our big advantage. Data store code name "Saycron" sits on the Demanjo's Distributed file system. Indexing -- > uses a data structure i call "Octo-tree" Outperforms any multidimensional index i came across in any academic papers. Web server -- > Code name "SlimAPE". simple non blocking. Web framework -- > Code name "HerikX". I will write about all of these technologies later on my b…

I'd like to get in touch. Looked at your profile and no email so can you drop me one if you get the opportunity? Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Crawling car dealerships for a real time consumer search engine

#64
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sounds dodgy from a Google perspective republishing other peoples content Actually, it is just publishing compiled facts. It might violate the ToS, but it probably doesn't violate copyright.

Do you know of any good articles demonstrating the repercussions of violating a ToS vs. violating a copyright? I'm guessing violating a copyright is more likely to result in aggressive legal action whereas a ToS violation would just get you banned from the service or sent some sort of cease and desist.

yeah its a bit of a grey area I suspect that the big players don't want to be the first one to start legal proceedings - they want some one else to pull the trigger.

I used to work for Reed Elsevier and there was rampant scrapeing and plagiarizing going on usually to create crappy MFA sites or to insert middlemen (offering no social value) into the job board market.

I possibly could see EU based recruitment companies going after indeed - maybe if stepstone are up for a fight.

Matt Cutts whats the deal on allowing indeeds search results into your index I thought you did not like other se results in Googles index

Re: Show HN: Crawling car dealerships for a real time consumer search engine

#65
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

amplified log playback works best in my experience. of course, this requires at least some public traffic to play back. i've only used proprietary tools for this in my personal experience, but i believe jmeter has this functionality (log sampling).

This seems really interesting. When you say proprietary tools, I assume you mean more custom-built solutions and less paid tools available to anyone?

yeah, tools built in-house to test specific apps, not commercial apps
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