Show HN: Crawling car dealerships for a real time consumer search engine
1–10 of 66 posts
Re: Show HN: Crawling car dealerships for a real time consumer search engine
#2How did you manage to come into agreement with car dealers to crawl their sites and use their photos in your aggregator? Congratulations!
Re: Show HN: Crawling car dealerships for a real time consumer search engine
#3It's clean and fast. How do you fetch the data and what's the revenue model? Cheers.
Re: Show HN: Crawling car dealerships for a real time consumer search engine
#4How did you manage to come into agreement with car dealers to crawl their sites and use their photos in your aggregator? Congratulations!
“Listings are currently sourced from several delearship websites by means of crawling and extracting relevant content available on the host application. If you are a dealer wishing to list and/or promote your inventory on Demanjo, we can help you drive qualified, local shoppers to your dealership.”
and “The selection and placement of listings on this page, except featured listings, were determined automatically by a computer program. For premium placement, please contact us.”
It doesn’t sound like he asked permission.
Re: Show HN: Crawling car dealerships for a real time consumer search engine
#5How did you manage to come into agreement with car dealers to crawl their sites and use their photos in your aggregator? Congratulations!
I would guess they did so in the same way that google asks every website operator before crawling and caching. (I.e., I suspect they didn't come to any explicit agreement. If google doesn't, why should they need to?)
Re: Show HN: Crawling car dealerships for a real time consumer search engine
#6How did you manage to come into agreement with car dealers to crawl their sites and use their photos in your aggregator? Congratulations!
I would guess they did so in the same way that google asks every website operator before crawling and caching. (I.e., I suspect they didn't come to any explicit agreement. If google doesn't, why should they need to?)
Given that Google has been sued over that countless times, as a small startup I would be wary of following their example.
Re: Show HN: Crawling car dealerships for a real time consumer search engine
#7I think this is nice, and I already found a deal I haven't come across yet on a vehicle I'm interested in, so thanks!
A few initial thoughts:
- I can't click the radio buttons themselves within each options group; only the link/label itself is clickable
- I would rather the mileage filters be - I want to select multiples of other filters too. Year for example. eBay allows me to enter "2009-2011" or "2009-". I can only view one year at a time on this site.
- It took me a minute to realize I had to select a make before a model (yes, I feel stupid for this); showing an empty stub where the options will appear once I have selected a make is not intuitive - how about not showing the not-yet-ready filters until they are relevant?
- Seeing the "Contact Dealer" red button directly below the phone number made me initially think I was going to be calling the dealer. I finally clicked it after seeing no other place to view the dealer's own listing. I'd make getting to the dealer's site a bit more prominent
Re: Show HN: Crawling car dealerships for a real time consumer search engine
#8Suggest a map that shows which dealer and where a car is located. There's a subset of car buyers where the car itself is less important than the garage they bought it from, in case they need to bring it back for repairs / tuning etc. This is especially true of used cars. And very important on mobile
Re: Show HN: Crawling car dealerships for a real time consumer search engine
#9I have built something very similar to this is the past, here are a couple of observations:
Scraping:
- Dealer web sites are run by a handful of different data brokers, for the most part if you find a good way to scrape one (say dealer who uses http://www.dealer.com/ than you can extend your scraper to get others)
- Dealer web sites, in general, are horrible to view.
- Learn to love VIN explosion/decoding - http://www.researchmaniacs.com/VIN/VIN-Decoder.html the dealers enter features in so many different ways, it is your best chance to normalize the data.
- Normalize the ext. color, create a distinct list of all the crazy colors of car makers give their cars and all the short hand dealers give the colors. Create a map of the colors and apply when scraping
- Scraping is like farming, a lot of initial work, but there is constant upkeep for changing sites
Display:
- User's don't want to search by city as much as what is close to them, you should geocode the dealerships and display distance. For instance if I search West Des Moines, I would expect inventory in Des Moines also to come up
- Add searching by zip code, you can easily find database of the centroids. It can also be a cheap way of geocoding the dealerships
- Switch Mileage to use miles instead of KM, it looks like most of the inventory is in the US an that is what the user will expect.
- Use a ip2geo to set the initial location of the search, right now it looks like it is all over the place, check to see if the browser supports geo location and optionally set the initial search by that
Re: Show HN: Crawling car dealerships for a real time consumer search engine
#10Suggest a map that shows which dealer and where a car is located. There's a subset of car buyers where the car itself is less important than the garage they bought it from, in case they need to bring it back for repairs / tuning etc. This is especially true of used cars. And very important on mobile
Maybe it's something country-specific, but why would you do repairs in the same garage? Or did you mean the dealer's guarantee period?