Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

Hey all - we built this because we really like buying off craigslist vs dealerships. Its still pretty new but we'd love to know how we could make it better, so any and all comments are much appreciated. Thanks!

This looks fantastic! Reminds me of padmapper, for cars. I'm really liking some of the things you've done to parse out information into a more digestible/searchable format. The dynamic filters, mousing-over-to-see-different-images, and allowing me to 'favorite' listings makes this a godsend compared to manual craigslist-surfing. Have you considered searching by color? I know this won't be easy to parse out but perhaps image recognition would be more reliable?

Well done!

Ya, adding color search is definitely on our roadmap. It'll be pretty easy for dealership cars, since they usually list it, and for Craigslist hopefully some blob detection will work.

No Datsun?!?

For "car guys" you need to allow searching by the platform code. Way more important and specific than the decade-spanning model names. For example "e30" should return '83-91 BMW 3 Series.

Love that you can specify Slushbox/Manual and exclude salvage titles.

Very annoying that middle-clicking car posting titles on the 'grid view' page does not open the cars in new tabs. I want to scan through the list and open all the ones I find interesting, then look through the details one at a time.

Clicking the site's logo (top left) should bring you back to the no-current-search homepage. Not edit the current search. Right now it feels as if you can't entirely clear the search. Clicking back to the homepage should definitely do that.

I use this site for a list of desirable year/model cars. You might get a few ideas from them: http://autoemu.com/

This has some similarity to Autoglance (which is more Hipmunk-like in its UI, currently does not include craigslist data, but does allow searching by color) posted here a few days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3484875