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Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

carsabi.com

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Re: Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

#21

Post by pkamb »

dw5ight wrote: post #12
pkamb wrote: 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!

Definitely a full/real browser tab. That's what middle-clicking does, it opens a new browser tab. Unless the site does something nonstandard. [Sidenote: Chrome extension to always enforce standard middle-clicking?]

P.S. I updated my original post with a few more suggestions.

Re: Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

#22

Post by blueski »

Love it! Searching on value feels like it'd be useful for a trader, but not necessarily an individual with a strict price limit. How about adding a value measure to the boxes? Then users could sort by price but still pick out the real bargains.

Also would be nice to search for several models together and/or criteria rather than models (e.g. "manual hatchback between $7 and $10k").

Good luck!

Re: Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

#23

Post by ck2 »

Some feedback:

1. didn't work for me until I realized I have to enable cookies?

2. how do I search for any kind of hatchback?

3. did my scrollbar just turn pink in chrome? really? Are we back in the 1990s with IE ?

4. be sure to get permission BEFORE you start crawling them:

http://www.google.com/search?q=craigslist+sues

Re: Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

#24

Post by daguar »

ck2 wrote: post #23

Some feedback: 1. didn't work for me until I realized I have to enable cookies? 2. how do I search for any kind of hatchback? 3. did my scrollbar just turn pink in chrome? really? Are we back in the 1990s with IE ? 4. be sure to get permission BEFORE you start crawling them: http://www.google.com/search?q=craigslist+sues

+1 to #2:

It'd be super neat to associate that may not be explicit in your fields or the source CL data with certain make/models.

Re: Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

#26

Post by raccoonone »

blueski wrote: post #22

Love it! Searching on value feels like it'd be useful for a trader, but not necessarily an individual with a strict price limit. How about adding a value measure to the boxes? Then users could sort by price but still pick out the real bargains. Also would be nice to search for several models together and/or criteria rather than models (e.g. "manual hatchback between $7 and $10k"). Good luck!

Definitely, we'd like to add more comparison as to how good of a deal you're getting, but just haven't had time yet.

The hatchback/sedan/... is on our roadmap too. It's a little tricky, because often sellers don't post it explicitly, and doing computer vision on the pictures, would be very hard.

Re: Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

#27

Post by underwater »

Nice interface. A few thoughts:

* There is no way to get back to the home screen. If I want a blank slate I have to manually clear out the fields.

* I can't bookmark searches, send them to friends or search for multiple models at the same time because everything is cookie based. Having my search from my last session come up when I enter http://www.carsabi.com/ is also a bit creepy.

* Clearing the "max price" field is broken. All future searches come back with zero results. Refreshing the page shows "$0" in the field.

Re: Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

#29

Post by joshu »

pkamb wrote: 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…

I've noticed that the kind of listings for "e30 m3" versus "1989 m3" is going to end up being from a different kind of owner...

Re: Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

#30

Post by vaksel »

pretty good, although for craigslist, there is really no sense in letting someone search within 14 days.

anything that's a good deal is gone almost right away

I lost out on like a dozen cars before I bought my last one. And that was only because I saw the ad get listed in the previous 5 minutes, and went right away to test drive it.

As far as feedback, 1 bug - when you scroll through the makes, it keeps hiding. Especially annoying if it's a brand at the bottom of the list(i.e. Mercedes).

Feature wise, the map of the car's location isn't that useful, much better would be to just list how many miles away the person is...and maybe even estimate the time to get there.(i.e. I remember thinking oh 30 miles, not that bad...then you spend 45 minutes driving to and from there, and pretty much your entire day is gone, just to see one car)

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