Google Car Search

https://www.google.com/cars/

by kirubakaran • 14 years ago

94 39 14 years ago

erickhill• 14 years ago

Interesting. Must be in soft-launch - I get "Zip code not in the supported region." This won't be a direct Craigslist competitor as it seems to be aimed at dealer inventories.

hakaaak• 14 years ago

Yep, they made this mistake with flight search also. Let everyone know about a service with crappy data, then everyone thinks it is crappy and never go back to it. Brilliant, from the minds of geniuses. It worked for Gmail because users didn't need data to begin with, but it doesn't work for services that require a lot of data to start with to be viable. And even if you have data, it better be good; ask Apple about their maps.

intregus• 14 years ago

Does anyone know if this is, or will be, powered by microformats?

joejohnson• 14 years ago

Their database doesn't have any of the Tesla models :(

hornbaker• 14 years ago

Looks a little half-baked – only 3 BMW M3s near Silicon Valley, and no Porsches? Otherwise, the interface looks nice, and I hope they crawl more inventory, including pre-owned.

It reminds me of the ill-fated Google Real Estate search (http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2011/01/retiring-real-est...). That said, Google was going up against strong competitors in Trulia and Zillow at the time, and there doesn't seem to be a strong competitor in the car search space.

millstone• 14 years ago

Volkswagen seems like a big omission.

gojomo• 14 years ago

Yes, they've left out the largest brand in the world.

http://www.economist.com/node/21558269

Is Google currently in some spat with Germany?

sdoering2• 14 years ago

Well actually it is. This, not having to do with cars or anything like this, is because Germany want's to establish some kind of "tax" on sites like Google News, to subside it's big publishing-houses.

Google is aggressively lobbying for a "free" internet (free meaning, Google can make money as they see fit) and the publishers are lobbying aggressively for this law, to get some slice of the advertising-cake, that ends up in Googles purse. As the publishers are not able to build a successful online-business, they try to lobby for this subsidiary.

So some kind of "lobby-war" between Google, German publishers and the German Government going on right now.

aqme28• 14 years ago

Interesting that it defaults to Acura. I wonder if money is being exchanged over that.

kirubakaran• 14 years ago

It was Lexus for me. I figured it must be based on some insidious profiling.

sshconnection• 14 years ago

It seems to be. Pulled up a cargo moving van for me, something I had recently searched for but have no interest in actually owning.

avolcano• 14 years ago

Erm, probably mostly has to do with Acura being first alphabetically on the list.

timwoj• 14 years ago

Or it could just be that it's in alphabetical order, and defaults to the first one in the list.

notatoad• 14 years ago

from the bottom of the page:

>Our service is free to you but to operate this service, we are compensated by some of the providers.

thecosas3• 14 years ago

It's more than likely that manufacturers aren't too excited about this. They like having control over pricing and this removes that to some extent.

They go to great lengths in order to make sure individual dealers play by the same rules (compliance) for this very reason.

swalsh• 14 years ago

When I was buying a new car a few months ago, I found these guys to be invaluable: http://carwoo.com/

sologoub2• 14 years ago

I find this fascinating: http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

Basically, Google is trying to go after KBB, Edmunds, and to a lesser extent TrueCar/Carwoo, and hit right at the "what is a fair market price".

Given that they are saying that they are gathering the data, it probably explains why they coverage is not that good for inventory, but I'd expect that to be remedied quickly if they put sufficient resources behind it.

It should be noted that this appears to be a new car thing primarily.

thecosas3• 14 years ago

yep. they would likely need to get dealers to sign up for the service and share some data ala TrueCar.

sologoub2• 14 years ago

Looks like this has been going on for a while now. Here's a write-up: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2188016/Google-Cars-New...

JoeCortopassi• 14 years ago

Pretty terrible search.

Looked for Toyota Tundra, found none. Typed it in again, and chose a few of the auto-completes suggested to me. No results. Looked for a F-150, no results. It's one thing to not have some of the most popular automobiles available, but quite another to not have results for something that you suggested I search for. Besides that, what is this supposed to do? If I click on one of the cars that it happens to have I get a blank page. Is this supposed to help me buy a car? See what's out there? Know fair value? I just think that someone jumped the gun on this, and it could be executed on quite a bit better

thecosas3• 14 years ago

It's actually been out for some time now. Here's an article from June 28, 2012 detailing it in more depth: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2188016/Google-Cars-New...

Not saying that makes it any better... just saying its not something that was launched yesterday.

cloudwalking• 14 years ago

Perhaps there are no Toyota Tundras for sale in your area? Both of your cited searches work fine for me (Bay Area).

BHSPitMonkey• 14 years ago

Are you not noticing where it says "Searching within 25 miles of [your ZIP code]" on the results page?

Samuel_Michon• 14 years ago

"Google Car Search"

Law enforcement officers need a warrant to do that ;)

dhosek• 14 years ago

I was part of the team that did this: http://www.newcars.com/carchooser#1 While it requires flash, it's a lot more flexible and includes the ability to compare across makes and models.

sixQuarks• 14 years ago

I like it. Are you a freelancer or do you still work full-time for them?

fractalsea• 14 years ago

Now we just need motorbike search.

Looks like it has potential. Should be able to generalise it to other products. Looks nicer than their current search.

amitn• 14 years ago

Seriously?

austenallred• 14 years ago

Does anyone know what data feed they're pulling from? Or if they're pulling from one? I couldn't find a Honda Civic within 100 miles of me. My local classifieds showed 449 results for the same search -- looks like my zip isn't supported.

Suffice it to say they're going to need a better feed to search if this will ever be successful.

grok2• 14 years ago

A big problem is that the photos shown are stock photos (atleast the ones I looked at were marked as stock photos). So in a few cases, the prices don't match the photo. For instance, I looked for Honda Fit and the stock photo shows a Honda Fit Sport model which is priced a couple of K higher than the price they have against the photo.

bicknergseng• 14 years ago

Strange to me that Google would put up something that clearly isn't ready.

sdoering2• 14 years ago

A lot of the new products, Google tries (and aggregating sale info on cars is just one of them) is actually not ready. It is not in a state, that is really usable, or has a good UX.

But non the less, other aggregation-sites are being punished by the differend Panda-Updates, for reasons, of too less content, bad UX, et al.

So practically Google punishes sites, throws them out of the index (or a lot further back) and then builts something, they did perfectly fine - just to make money on this.

If I would have to imagine, where the data came from... well why would Google have forced the microformats and machine-readable content... OK, forget that. Sounds just too much like a conspiracy... ;-)

philip1209• 14 years ago

In addition to infringing on specific car websites, does this mark an infringement on FindTheBest domain?

http://cars.findthebest.com/

ajays• 14 years ago

Once again, Google copies Yahoo http://autos.yahoo.com/

dotborg• 14 years ago

as long as they don't enforce this to search results it does not exist, but when they do that, carwoo etc. will cease to exist.

2buckchuck• 14 years ago

Well, that sucked. Thanks Google. :P

guard-of-terra• 14 years ago

That's not the level of product I expect from Google.

A couple of teenagers with PHP could throw together something like that.

vampirechicken• 14 years ago

"Zip code not in supported region" is not a consumer friendly error message.

alainc• 14 years ago

Wow, that's really bad - it only works if you're looking at one particular car! If you're comparing, or researching, they add nothing.

Google Car Search

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