Rate HN: Our site - Looklookbuy • Hacker News Board

Re: Rate HN: Our site - Looklookbuy

#31

Post by kyro » Wed, Aug 12, 2009, 9:26 PM UTC

staunch wrote: post #17

You're not really allowed to search Craigslist, right? Edit: I should add that I like what you guys have done. Congrats on launching.

Craigslist TOS says we are prohibited from using their data if we ourselves are providing classified services. I looked around and found that all sites that were asked to stop their use of Craigslist data were sites that were constantly scraping the site to populate their own database. The way we see it, a user searching on our site, and us querying CL, is no different than that user directly searching on CL. We're querying them per user search.

Re: Rate HN: Our site - Looklookbuy

#32

Post by lpgauth » Wed, Aug 12, 2009, 9:27 PM UTC

Adding support for http://www.kijiji.com/ would be nice.

Re: Rate HN: Our site - Looklookbuy

#33

Post by kyro » Wed, Aug 12, 2009, 9:28 PM UTC

lpgauth wrote: post #32

Adding support for http://www.kijiji.com/ would be nice.

Yeah, that's on the list.

Re: Rate HN: Our site - Looklookbuy

#34

Post by staunch » Wed, Aug 12, 2009, 9:31 PM UTC

kyro wrote: post #31

staunch wrote: post #17

You're not really allowed to search Craigslist, right? Edit: I should add that I like what you guys have done. Congrats on launching.

Craigslist TOS says we are prohibited from using their data if we ourselves are providing classified services. I looked around and found that all sites that were asked to stop their use of Craigslist data were sites that were constantly scraping the site to populate their own database. The way we see it, a user searching on our site, and us querying CL, is no different than that user directly searching on CL. We're q…

I just remember other sites (like Housingmaps.com) being exceptions because they were totally non-commercial. I didn't actually read their TOS until now. It looks like you're definitely in violation of their TOS.

They might not really care or notice unless you grow though.

Re: Rate HN: Our site - Looklookbuy

#35

Post by cninja » Wed, Aug 12, 2009, 9:36 PM UTC

Zarathu wrote: post #16

jedediah wrote: post #12

Very cool! To increase the signal/noise ratio, I'd love to specify that I'm looking for a product, and not accessories for a product. For example, I just searched for a camera I'm looking to buy. The first large set of results were accessories for that camera, and since they're cheaper than the camera itself, they showed up first. Great start!

Yeah, this is one of the problems that we've been dealing with for a while, and we're still not sure how to really go about eliminating product accessories when the user is simply looking for that product. Unfortunately, this comes up whenever you search websites like Craigslist or eBay, so without getting really creative, there's not a whole lot we can do to completely get rid of this problem. I'm glad we were able…

My camera test search query ended up getting good results after modifying it to "powershot -battery -cable -case -protector -charger -adapter"

Would it work to attach a "accessory word blacklist" to the end of every search query that does not explicitly have one of the accessory words in it?

Re: Rate HN: Our site - Looklookbuy

#36

Post by cninja » Wed, Aug 12, 2009, 9:40 PM UTC

sgrove wrote: post #8

Hmm, very nice. I like the layout, nice UI, very clean. I would be nice if you tapped into some geolocation to provide my default location (let me change it of course) so I only had to fill in two fields (or possibly even one) to see some relevant results. Congrats on launching, and I wish you the best of luck!

Also, permanently save whatever zipcode I enter (as a cookie or something), so that I don't have to retype it when I come back to the site at a later date.

Re: Rate HN: Our site - Looklookbuy

#37

Post by crsmith » Wed, Aug 12, 2009, 9:53 PM UTC

I'd add this as a firefox search plug-in

Re: Rate HN: Our site - Looklookbuy

#38

Post by auston » Wed, Aug 12, 2009, 10:07 PM UTC

kyro wrote: post #31

staunch wrote: post #17

You're not really allowed to search Craigslist, right? Edit: I should add that I like what you guys have done. Congrats on launching.

Craigslist TOS says we are prohibited from using their data if we ourselves are providing classified services. I looked around and found that all sites that were asked to stop their use of Craigslist data were sites that were constantly scraping the site to populate their own database. The way we see it, a user searching on our site, and us querying CL, is no different than that user directly searching on CL. We're q…

I'm not sure that will stand for long:

http://crgslst.com/

Re: Rate HN: Our site - Looklookbuy

#39

Post by thomaspaine » Wed, Aug 12, 2009, 10:35 PM UTC

Are you doing anything like transforming the links into affiliate links? If that doesn't violate Amazon or whoever's TOS, it would be a good way to monetize.

Re: Rate HN: Our site - Looklookbuy

#40

Post by jeroen » Wed, Aug 12, 2009, 10:58 PM UTC

Zarathu wrote: post #16

jedediah wrote: post #12

Very cool! To increase the signal/noise ratio, I'd love to specify that I'm looking for a product, and not accessories for a product. For example, I just searched for a camera I'm looking to buy. The first large set of results were accessories for that camera, and since they're cheaper than the camera itself, they showed up first. Great start!

Yeah, this is one of the problems that we've been dealing with for a while, and we're still not sure how to really go about eliminating product accessories when the user is simply looking for that product. Unfortunately, this comes up whenever you search websites like Craigslist or eBay, so without getting really creative, there's not a whole lot we can do to completely get rid of this problem. I'm glad we were able…

I had the same thing with accessories. It would be very useful if you could provide a button to remove an entry from the list and then all similar entries are automatically removed as well.