
Show HN: Craigslist Car Search  - dw5ight
http://carsabi.com
======
senthil_rajasek
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?

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

[http://newyork.craigslist.org/search/cta?query=nissan&sr...](http://newyork.craigslist.org/search/cta?query=nissan&srchType=T&format=rss)

~~~
evandena
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.

------
dw5ight
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
I wish I had this site this summer when I was looking for a used car. This was
exactly what I wanted; mad props!

------
deltaqueue
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!

------
arosenberg
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.

------
mrmaddog
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!

~~~
raccoonone
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.

------
conipto
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.

------
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.

~~~
raccoonone
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)

~~~
underwater
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.

------
simonsarris
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
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.

------
pkamb
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/>

~~~
joshu
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...

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

------
michaelschade
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.

------
IanDrake
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

------
lambtron
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!

------
kasrak
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".

~~~
dw5ight
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!

------
bengl3rt
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?

------
gleb
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

~~~
dw5ight
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!

------
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!

~~~
raccoonone
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.

~~~
blueski
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?

------
dreadsword
You're very vulnerable to CL shutting you down.

------
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>

~~~
daguar
+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.

------
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)

~~~
dw5ight
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
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.

~~~
dw5ight
no kidding?! That would make my life soooooooo much easier. If you have any
contacts would be stoked to make the connection - my email is
dw5ight@gmail.com, else I'll shoot them a line and see if anyone wants to talk
to two guys in an apartment :P Thanks!

------
jaredsohn
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>

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

------
mkr-hn
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...](http://atlanta.craigslist.org/search/cto?query=saturn+sc2&srchType=T&minAsk=1000&maxAsk=3000)

------
sktrdie
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?

~~~
dw5ight
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!

------
ricksta
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.

~~~
dw5ight
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
"I honestly hadn't even thought about international stuff yet"

You must be American.

------
lysine23
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.

------
kisielk
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?

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

~~~
grecy
Please add support for Canada.

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

~~~
nik_0_0
Agreed! If you are using the RSS feeds, there should be an easy way to include
us Canadians :)

------
cbr
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
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

------
jasimq
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? :)

------
plasma
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 :(

------
Nathan_Fair
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

------
sir_charles804
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.

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

~~~
mlkrime
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.

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

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

------
timsegraves
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.

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

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

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

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

------
gnu8
Would like the ability to search by cylinders, displacement, horsepower, and
also 2wd, 4wd, awd.

------
grammargod
Where's Infiniti in the make list?

~~~
dw5ight
wow. we seriously forgot to add Infiniti - will fix tonight, thanks!!!!!!

::facepalm::

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
dcpdx
<http://www.rentjungle.com>

------
bordicon
Awesome tool, will use to buy next car.

------
atomicdog
Doesn't work with UK postcodes

------
cvanderlinden
US only? How about Canada?

------
md1515
Amazing. You are god.

------
fowkswe
oh please craig, let it stay...

------
grabbies200
these guys are awesome!

------
gcb
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.

~~~
ry0ohki
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.

~~~
rorrr
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.

~~~
gabaix
The unstructured data makes Craigslist a much easier place to post listings. I
don't have to click or press TAB and ask myself "what is this field now?" You
could arguably find the make / model through natural language processing,
which with CL philosophy and resources might be a stretch.

~~~
gcb
that's a trade off. a bad one.

in CL you don't think about posting, but your ad will be removed by other
sellers with higher price (happened to my nexus one when i tried to sell) and
buried in a couple hours. and expire in a couple days. And then, the READER
has to put in all the time the writers didn't put.

on other sites, you waste some time to write, but you can be sure you will not
be removed without reason, the ad last longer, and the buyer can get there
quickly.

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

