

Google Car Search - kirubakaran
https://www.google.com/cars/

======
JoeCortopassi
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

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

------
sologoub
I find this fascinating:
[http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2646883)

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.

~~~
sologoub
Looks like this has been going on for a while now. Here's a write-up:
[http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2188016/Google-Cars-
New...](http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2188016/Google-Cars-New-
Sponsored-Results-Not-Yet-Generating-Many-Car-Leads)

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

------
erickhill
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
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.

------
millstone
Volkswagen seems like a big omission.

~~~
gojomo
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?

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

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

~~~
sshconnection
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.

------
hornbaker
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...](http://google-
latlong.blogspot.com/2011/01/retiring-real-estate-on-google-maps.html)). 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.

------
grok2
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.

------
austenallred
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.

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

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

------
fractalsea
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.

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

------
alainc
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.

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

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

------
ajays
Once again, Google copies Yahoo <http://autos.yahoo.com/>

------
Samuel_Michon
_"Google Car Search"_

Law enforcement officers need a warrant to do that ;)

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

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

~~~
sdoering
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... ;-)

------
dotborg
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
Well, that sucked. Thanks Google. :P

------
amitn
Seriously?

------
philip1209
In addition to infringing on specific car websites, does this mark an
infringement on FindTheBest domain?

<http://cars.findthebest.com/>

