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Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

carsabi.com

11–20 of 105 posts

Re: Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

#11
Nice job. Suggestion: specify what format you expect for the "Near" field. It took me a few tries to realize it wanted a ZIP code (and all the while it was telling me to "match the requested format").

Also, did you get permission from craigslist to index their listings? I was looking into building something like this, but their terms said something along the lines of "don't access our site with a crawler unless we give you permission".

Re: Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

#12
post #8

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…

shoot - yeah, we were sort of undecided on how to do this. Would you prefer a full tab in the browser or a tab within the webpage to see the car details? Obviously our current bootstrap modal isn't capable of this, but once we've added some pricing statistics we're going to shift to probably one of the above formats. Thanks for the feedback!

Re: Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

#14
I like it. I'm located in Canada and when I put in my canadian zip code first just to get back to the main page again. You should give a notification when someone enters in a zip code you no longer support instead of failing silently.

Re: Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

#15
According to the Craigslist Terms Of Use (http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use)

7. CONDUCT

You agree not to post, email, or otherwise make available Content: ...

u) use automated means, including spiders, robots, crawlers, data mining tools, or the like to download data from the Service - unless expressly permitted by craigslist;

I am wondering if you already have permission from craigslist?

Re: Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

#17

According to the Craigslist Terms Of Use ( http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use ) 7. CONDUCT You agree not to post, email, or otherwise make available Content: ... u) use automated means, including spiders, robots, crawlers, data mining tools, or the like to download data from the Service - unless expressly permitted by craigslist; I am wondering if you already have permission from craigslist?

[edit: added mention of Padmapper]

I have heard -- anecdotally, at least -- that while that TOS exists, CL practically enforces this if you're (a) straining the site and/or (b) using it for commercial purposes that seem to go against the spirit of CL. [Hence, neat things like Padmapper, the author of which is really like the nicest guy based on limited interactions.]

(Disclosures: I read this a few years ago for another project, and I also happen to know one of the developers of this site.)

Re: Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

#19
post #11

Nice job. Suggestion: specify what format you expect for the "Near" field. It took me a few tries to realize it wanted a ZIP code (and all the while it was telling me to "match the requested format"). Also, did you get permission from craigslist to index their listings? I was looking into building something like this, but their terms said something along the lines of "don't access our site with a crawler unless we gi…

Thanks! I think we'll try to link directly to google geocoding later, but for now I'll definitely add zipcode placeholder text.

As to Craigslist - we'll see? We actually built a pretty robust classification engine that you can run on any html, so we've added about 600 dealerships in California and are planning on running the crawler on dealerships nationally soon if we can get more server money. I think we're hoping that if we provide a free service where you can see what better deals Craigslist has compared to Autotrader etc people will generally think its cool instead of lame. Thanks for checking us out!

Re: Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

#20
The zipcode doesn't deal with leading zeros on autodetection properly. Mine said "2138" where it should have said "02138", so it took me a minute to realize it was a zip code.
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