Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

by dw5ight • 15 years ago

236 103 15 years ago

dw5ight10• 15 years ago

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!

aditij• 15 years ago

I wish I had this site this summer when I was looking for a used car. This was exactly what I wanted; mad props!

lowlevel2• 15 years ago

Please change the location selector to allow Canadian locations and searching on the Canadian craigslist sites. Other than that shortcoming, pretty great as far as I'm concerned.

elic• 15 years ago

Great idea, definitely will use this for my next car. Probably much easier to build a business around this than Padmapper.

mrmaddog• 15 years ago

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!

raccoonone4• 15 years ago

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.

bordicon• 15 years ago

Awesome tool, will use to buy next car.

fowkswe• 15 years ago

oh please craig, let it stay...

pkamb4• 15 years ago

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/

dw5ight10• 15 years ago

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!

pkamb4• 15 years ago

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.

joshu• 15 years ago

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...

pkamb4• 15 years ago

Yeah, definitely. But searching "e30" could not only do a keyword search but also compile the right cars from the right years.

lowlevel2• 15 years ago

Sounds pretty insane and hard to maintain to me. I would leave it to the buyer to know what year of car he's interested and set the date range appropriately. I feel it's too much to ask sites like this to do this behind the scenes.

gdhillon• 15 years ago

Awesome.. I really like it. I can definitely see lots of people including myself using it for my next car search.

jaredsohn• 15 years ago

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

kasrak• 15 years ago

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".

dw5ight10• 15 years ago

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!

conipto• 15 years ago

This is great. Just literally gave up searching CL for a new car after ten minutes of click/back/click/back and saw this here. Timing couldn't be better, and it's quite intuitive.

ricksta• 15 years ago

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.

dw5ight10• 15 years ago

yeah, that's a major fail on our part. I'll add a notification that only USA is currently supported - thanks for the feedback I honestly hadn't even thought about international stuff yet :P

scoot• 15 years ago

"I honestly hadn't even thought about international stuff yet"

You must be American.

senthil_rajasek• 15 years ago

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?

daguar2• 15 years ago

[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.)

juiceandjuice• 15 years ago

picclick.com/Craigslist

jzawodn• 15 years ago

What he said.

joe_the_user• 15 years ago

I make a point of flagging the various companies that occasionally appear here with scheme for violating craiglist TOS.

In this instance, all the ads that I tried to click-through to had been removed already - which shows one good reason for Craiglist not allowing this stuff.

GigabyteCoin2• 15 years ago

Very true. Carsabi could easily make craigslist look stupid if they don't stay on top of their listings.

rorrr2• 15 years ago

They have RSS feeds. This, for instance, is Nissans around NYC:

http://newyork.craigslist.org/search/cta?query=nissan&sr...

evandena• 15 years ago

I usually have half a dozen RSS searches added to my Google reader for items I am keeping an eye out for. Using the advance search operators and RSS feeds, I usually am the first person to reply to ads.

GigabyteCoin2• 15 years ago

Just because they have RSS feeds, doesn't mean you are allowed to scrape them. RSS feeds have plenty of legitimate consumer purposes.

kisielk• 15 years ago

I can't seem to get this to work. I type "Vancouver" in the "near" box and I just get a message that says "Please match the requested format.". What's the requested format? What did I do wrong?

raccoonone4• 15 years ago

You have to enter a zipcode, sorry that's not clear.

grecy• 15 years ago

Please add support for Canada.

Heck, while you're in there, make it work world-wide.. CL is, so you may as well be.

cbr• 15 years ago

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.

zavulon• 15 years ago

It seems like the auto-detection is off anyway. I'm in 10003, and it said "7927" for me. I'm on a desktop, without any kind of wi-fi or GPS, so not sure where it got that - certainly not by IP

blueski2• 15 years ago

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!

raccoonone4• 15 years ago

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.

blueski2• 15 years ago

Great. I wondered if you could take whatever you're using for the "Best Value" ordering and display that metric in the boxes (so no need for more analysis).

Maybe you could store which models are always hatchbacks and always sedans, as a starting point (relatively few models have a hatchback version in the US so I think this would get you 80% of the way there). For those where there's a sedan/hatchback version, perhaps assume it's the sedan unless sellers include hatchback keywords - and If in doubt, maybe show the result anyway with a question mark icon?

ck2• 15 years ago

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

daguar2• 15 years ago

+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.

bengl3rt• 15 years ago

This is awesome, but maybe consider persisting some basic parameters in the URL string so that I can bookmark a particular page that I like to check often?

underwater2• 15 years ago

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.

raccoonone4• 15 years ago

Ah yes, looks like we need to set some kind of sensible default for the maximum price.

Would you prefer to just bookmark searches, or login and be able to "save" them? (have them show up as separate tabs next to Saved Listings, or something like that)

underwater2• 15 years ago

Saved searches are usually more trouble than they're worth; sensible URLs are far more flexible.

The problem with the maximum price is not that I'm entering "$0" it's that I literally can't reset the input to a null state.

kpennell• 15 years ago

Very well done! Make it for rooms for rent as well please...

ericd• 15 years ago

PadMapper?

dcpdx• 15 years ago

http://www.rentjungle.com

vaksel2• 15 years ago

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)

dw5ight10• 15 years ago

Yeah, this is totally true. I think we'll be adding a notification system with saved searches soon, but we wanted to see if anyone liked the idea at all first.

Also with the 14 days thing - we're trying to build something that can crawl dealership websites as well, and are hoping to have this going nationally sometime soon. The entire idea is that Autotrader sucks and basically raises the prices for everyone while presenting a shitty interface - for things as large and expensive as cars I think the internet could literally track all instances available, allowing a rational decision process behind purchasing sans prioritization of pre-existing distribution channels or advertising budgets

Also will fix the make thing. Thanks!!!

timmaah• 15 years ago

Before you do much crawling of car dealer websites, you should talk to the companies who build the sites. (Dealer.com/Vinsolutions..etc) They have systems in place that package up the car listings for their dealers and send them in csv/xml format to many sites like Autotrader/Cars.com on a daily basis.

gcb4• 15 years ago

no idea what kind of car you were looking, but my last experience I took 1.5 mo to find a decent one. and then negotiation took another couple weeks.

in all that time i was still "searching" craigslist, and I could see the same cars over and over. A few were fast, of course.

vaksel2• 15 years ago

wasn't looking for a specific car, just wanted a good deal on a car that matched my criteria

ended up getting the car 30% below the KBB value

simonsarris• 15 years ago

Part of the problem with this is that nearly all of the best deals I've found on Craigslist (mostly camera lenses) were because the person actually misspelled the one key word in the title, which lead me to be the only person (or one of very few) who noticed the listing.

So I do hope that "Mazda Miata" also looks for listings without the word "Mazda" and also looks for the misspelled "Maita", etc, as well

ChaseB• 15 years ago

I purchased my 4Runner like this. 3 reposts over a month with "4 Runner" and dropped the price $1500 each time. He needed to sell it fast. I got a really good deal.

pguzmang• 15 years ago

For make Toyota, there isn't model MR2 :S.

It is missing a model :(

timsegraves• 15 years ago

Well done! I like it a lot. I'll probably be in the market for a car soon and will definitely check it out. Thanks.

andrewcamel• 15 years ago

BUG: Zip codes are losing leading zeroes - make sure you store them as strings rather than numbers.

cvanderlinden• 15 years ago

US only? How about Canada?

deltaqueue• 15 years ago

I used www.autotempest.com late last year to find my latest car and I'm glad to see some competition emerging.

After a quick review, two things that strike me:

1. One feature I like about AT is being about to see which cars are in which markets. Even though the search radius may include 5 surrounding cities, it would be nice to see some physical separation between the markets when combing through the results.

2. One feature I DIDN'T like about AT is that in trying to accomplish [1] from above, I often found myself annoyed when nothing was found in specific markets. This resulted in me having to click through the pagination to see if anything existed in other markets. The better way to handle this would have been to show only those cities with results, in order.

Good work so far!

jcarden2• 15 years ago

Finally a used car search service that makes sense. Though it needs a way to bookmark search results.

jcarden2• 15 years ago

Finally a used car search service that makes sense. Though it needs a way to bookmark search results. Great job regardless.

mlkrime2• 15 years ago

I think padmapper's two-tiered approach of allowing one unauthenticated and then authenticated use for access to bookmark and sharing features is elegant, and doesn't annoy people who just want to check the site out or use it lightly.

grammargod• 15 years ago

Where's Infiniti in the make list?

dw5ight10• 15 years ago

wow. we seriously forgot to add Infiniti - will fix tonight, thanks!!!!!!

::facepalm::

pkamb4• 15 years ago

Needs Datsun too! What, do you guys have a thing against Nissans?

mlkrime2• 15 years ago

Great Work! Nice feature set, looking forward to using this in the future.

dreadsword• 15 years ago

You're very vulnerable to CL shutting you down.

grabbies200• 15 years ago

these guys are awesome!

Nathan_Fair• 15 years ago

I have a promise from one of the founders that they will be adding motorcycle search... ok that's a lie. I have no such promise, but I want motorcycle search

gnu8• 15 years ago

Would like the ability to search by cylinders, displacement, horsepower, and also 2wd, 4wd, awd.

sir_charles804• 15 years ago

This is very cool and would be helpful for more than just cars if it weren't in violation of the terms of use on Craigslist.

sktrdie• 15 years ago

Very cool. What's the software stack behind this? How are you performing searches across all this very diverse data? For example, you must be doing some sort of text-analysis to retrieve the mileage property out of the text, no?

dw5ight10• 15 years ago

Craigslist is a ton of NLP to figure out common ways to phrase mileage etc... also catch all the mispellings.

We're also experimenting with some structured parsing for the universal dealership parser we alluded to - this means trying to figure out which part of the page has a listing so we dont accidentally report the mileage from a warranty or similar listings lower down the page... turns out to be a fairly tricky problem but its also a ton of fun to work on! Will keep you posted if we start having a ton of success automagically crawling the interweb. Thanks!

ErikRogneby• 15 years ago

On my laptop in Firefox the feedback button covers the keyword search. I suggest moving it to the upper right corner.

gleb• 15 years ago

Very nice. Used it to research upcoming purchase quickly, would have signed up to persist saved results if you had that option.

Main feedback - browser refresh, back/forward, tabs, middle-click should work, e.g.

- refresh now loses half the state (why half?)

- opening 'Click to view listing' messes up state (loses saved)

- want to be able to middle click on 'Details' to open in new tab

Nice to have: integration with Edmunds to appraise the car

dw5ight10• 15 years ago

1. Yeah, pretty much everybody today told us to make tabs work. Going to add for sure 2. Hadn't thought of saving searches (not listings) yet, great idea 3. Damn! My js skills suck, will debug 3. I'll check with Edmunds if they have an API, that could be cool. In the mean time we were going to add some stats about how any car compares to others nationally with the same model, year, and mileage

thanks!

lambtron• 15 years ago

Very useful. When I bought my Honda '92 on Craigslist, I was optimizing for cost and therefore spent a few weeks just feeling out the price range for model, mileage, and title (I was only looking at clean titles). It seems that the search settings here do a good job covering what my primary focus was.

In order to jump on the hottest deals, I would set up an IFTTT condition to email me when new queries were posted on Craigslist. Would be cool to have some monitoring with this site.

Regardless, very nice work!

jasimq• 15 years ago

I tried to search for "bmw m series". After the search box leaves focus, it's value changes to "BMW 3 Series", which is the first choice in the suggestions.

Don't you guys like the M cars? :)

therandomguy• 15 years ago

I searched for something and now it is stuck with that result. Even if I go to a new tab.

michaelschade• 15 years ago

Love it, the interface is great.

I'd like to see query parameters stored in the URL instead. As others have mentioned, it'd be nice to be able to bookmark pages and you currently can't. In addition to the bookmarking use case, I'd want to be able to email links to the results (e.g., so my dad could check them out).

It was also initially confusing to return to the homepage to find my past query, not the search form. Even if you don't get around to embedding search parameters in URL right away, consider adding a clear button to erase all of my input and let me start fresh.

More of a nitpick, but when I made a typo on my zip code on the main page and hit submit, it also erased my entry for the search box. The form data should be persisted even if there is an error, and the problem input should be highlighted in red or something.

revorad• 15 years ago

This is really well made. I'm building something similar for other product categories. Hope to put it on HN soon.

plasma• 15 years ago

I'm from Australia, but when I enter text into the "Near" box it says "Please match the requested format.".

What format was requested? I tried a postcode, and suburb, neither work.

Confusing as :(

gcb4• 15 years ago

my gripe with 90% of car searches.

i'm not after one specific car. i'm buying a used car.

i have a fixed budget and a some cars that I would avoid. everything else is fair game.

craigslist is the only one that get's it correct.

   1. put your price.
   2. get a bunch of crap you don't like
   3. add -crap1 to the search
   4. repeat 2 and 3 until you get things you like
   5. select a few, call, inspect, buy.

limiting by brand/model is like starting to shop by color.

dw5ight10• 15 years ago

hm, not sure how we'd add exclusion to the search. do you find any of the price/mileage filters useful or do you really just want to be able to say "No Hyundai" (or whatever)?

I think we'd also like to add some basic recommendation engine type stuff soon - my last car was a $500 tercel so feel you on the ubercheap classification. If we had a "Sort by Cheapest Reliable" option would that be useful?

Thanks!

badclient• 15 years ago

For starters just let people browse all used cars near them, you can even geo-located using ip.

Then provide a keyword, mileage and price filter on left--may be use range sliders?

ry0ohki• 15 years ago

I've felt this same way for a while, I've been running a used car site since 1995 (http://www.ausedcar.com). The sad thing is I've experimented with all sorts of other ways to search for cars over the years like what you are recommending (in the past I've let you search by fuel economy, etc...) but nothing seems to convert (ie work) as well as the same convention everyone else uses of Make and Model :\.

Also Craigslist will probably shut down the linked site soon, it's quite unfortunate how Craigslist essentially took the entire FSBO car market, but won't innovate in the way that this site shows it could.

rorrr2• 15 years ago

I can't agree more on the second point. If only they added mileage, year, make, model fields, this would instantly make car search painless.

What they have now is a bunch of unstructured data that users have to sift through.

CL is great, but the lack of innovation doesn't make any sense to me.

krschultz• 15 years ago

In my experience the best way to do it is to setup a couple of searches by make & price and subscribe to those RSS feeds. I'm usually looking at maybe 8 or 10 types of cars, not all cars. In fact when I was buying my last used car I had picked out make, model, trim, year and even with that I was able to look at 4 or 5 in a few weeks from the local craigslist ads.

mkr-hn• 15 years ago

I don't see a selection for Saturn's S series. One of the best lines they ever had.

http://atlanta.craigslist.org/search/cto?query=saturn+sc2...

acanyon• 15 years ago

Love this! So user friendly. Id love to see features used to create a new criagslist car posting.

danso• 15 years ago

In the search results, clicking to view a result is non functional on the iPad

md1515• 15 years ago

Amazing. You are god.

lysine23• 15 years ago

Nice. Needs saved searches and "anded" searches that would search for more than one thing at a time without having to enter it each time. Some sort of notification app for smartphones would be a good thing too.

arosenberg• 15 years ago

Interesting market, with probably a lot of emerging competition from players who understand how to get listing inventory and make interesting insights about the "value" of each listing. This is something we're testing at FindTheBest with our Cars For Sale section (http://buy-a-car.findthebest.com/). We've got a lot of the same functionality that Carsabi has, but we don't scrape Craigslist for our data. In addition, we can also show how an individual car for sale compares to similar cars in terms of price, mileage, etc. on detailed pages. For example, I know that this 2012 Audi A3 is selling for $2,000 less than the average for all other 2012 Audi A3's for sale now on our site (http://buy-a-car.findthebest.com/l/280922/2012-Audi-A3). And with hundreds of thousands of listings, this data starts to be reliable. Also can show for some cars, how they were reviewed by experts (with no effort from the posting user), by relating cars for sale with cars we've reviewed on our cars section (cars.findthebest.com). Glad there are a lot of people interested in disrupting this market though - there's a lot more we can do to help users find a great car to buy.

electrotype• 15 years ago

Can we know what language/framework/technologies are used on your site? It's pretty well done, congrats.

IanDrake• 14 years ago

dw5ight - Let me show you your future (http://notifywire.com)

You created a really nice site. Unfortunately, if you have any success CL will make legal moves to shut you down as they did with NotifyWire (which I created).

My software actually reduced server load on CL's servers when compared to the alternative (everyone using an RSS reader to do the same thing). So don't believe the BS about server load, they want complete control.

If you want to talk about what happened, send me an email ian@notifywire.com

atomicdog• 14 years ago

Doesn't work with UK postcodes

Show HN: Craigslist Car Search

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