

Rate HN: Our site - Looklookbuy - kyro

url - http://www.looklookbuy.com<p>Hey HN!<p>Two other HNers (Oompa and Zarathu) and I have gotten together to create Looklookbuy. We grew frustrated of having to jump from site to site, Craigslist to Amazon to eBay, etc, to find product prices. So we started work on Looklookbuy to hopefully alleviate some of those frustrations, in the hopes of others finding the service useful as well. We still have many things we'd like to implement, and are close to implementing, like more filtering options to help clean up the noise, and the ability to 'save' an ad via email. We do know that results can get a bit noisy and are working to change that, and are open to suggestions. We wanted to show you all what we had so far, and hope to use your feedback to make the site much better!<p>Some questions:<p>-Do you find it useful?<p>-What do you like/hate?<p>-What would you change?<p>-How would you increase the signal/noise ratio?<p>Some things we will be adding soon:<p>-Pagination<p>-Common words filter<p>-Saving ads via email<p>-More websites added to each product category<p>-More details regarding the individual product results<p>Thank you very much to those who will leave feedback/criticisms. We really value this community's opinions.<p>Follow us on Twitter @looklookbuy, if you wish.
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vaksel
You shouldn't require users to select category, that extra step is a huge pain
in the ass for the user.

Overall its a decent looking site, but there are a ton of sites that do the
same exact thing.

You need to figure out a way to differentiate yourself from all the other
scrapers.

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Oompa
Clickable link: <http://www.looklookbuy.com>

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troels
A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can
stop the script now, open the script in the debugger, or let the script
continue.

Script:
[http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.js:...](http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.js:1788)

\---

Why are the results loaded through javascript? can't they just be rendered
server side?

I like the name.

~~~
thomaspaine
It looks like the results are being loaded with independent ajax requests to
each product database. If this was just all done server side, you'd have to
wait until all of these requests finished loading instead of having them
appear on the page incrementally. Most people don't want to wait 10 seconds
for a page to load.

~~~
troels
I see. But there must be something more to it, because an asynchronous request
shouldn't lock up the browser. Maybe you could use the server as a proxy
between the browser and the search-site. It would still load asynchronous, but
it would be much swifter. That would also allow you to cache the results for
common queries.

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sgrove
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!

~~~
cninja
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.

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staunch
You're not really allowed to search Craigslist, right?

 _Edit:_ I should add that I like what you guys have done. Congrats on
launching.

~~~
kyro
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.

~~~
staunch
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.

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amjith
Wow!! This is nice. I like the simplicity.

Can you please add an "All" for the category section? Sometimes I'd like to
see all the results for a certain search term.

Instead of using the slider UI for the price range can we have text boxes, the
slider is not very user-friendly when I am trying to pick a range of 0-300
when the whole range is 0-5000.

~~~
phreanix
Awesome!

2nd on the 'All' selection in the categories (and have it default to it as
well) and text boxes for price ranges. But maybe you can have the ranges auto-
populate and just give us the ability to define the range if need be. Also
starting it off at zero kinda throws my reaction to the search results since
at zero the results would most likely not show the product I was searching for
and instead return accessories, etc. You might want to have the prices default
at midrange.

Otherwise, loving the layout and simplicity. Ya'll rocked it!

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peyton
Nice use of ajax. The site feels very responsive.

Buuut I have to type in my zip code every single time? I'm too lazy (srs). You
could always tie it to the session? The next step is to get hold of a geo-ip
database.

In Camino, the "look!" button on the homepage is blank. You should use a
button tag instead of an input tag. In fact, the whole header is broked in
Camino.

The page headers look clickable, but aren't. Same with the table header on the
list of blog posts.

Why are there separate electronics, computers, cell phones, and video games
sections sections? Same with home and furniture. And wtf are events? You
should add a better default category than "Apparel".

On the homepage, the "Just type in the product..." copy looks dense and
misplaced. The copyright notice seems lost as well.

Definitely add photos if legally possible.

Haha that's plenty. Good luck guys!

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jedediah
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!

~~~
Zarathu
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 to do it a little bit with cars and car parts.

Thanks for your feedback!

~~~
cninja
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?

~~~
Zarathu
I think we're going to have a list of common words found in the results that
you can uncheck to remove the irrelevant results.

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sam
Nice UI.

There is a bug on the price slider limits where there are no results, it shows
"+/- Infinity".

~~~
Oompa
Thanks for the heads up! I'll take a note of it and fix it tonight.

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furtivefelon
Perhaps automatically filters to sane prices? If you search for iphone 3gs,
first few pages are all really cheap (either accessories or have some catch
associated with them), not particularly useful unless specifically requested.

~~~
Zarathu
This is typically because of eBay links, where the current bid is still $1.

As far as the outrageously high prices go (iPhones costing $4 million dollars
and the like), I'm writing a formula to help get rid of those.

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huhtenberg
When showing the search results display either "picture available" or "picture
unavailable", but not both. The absence of one implies the presence of
another. Also, it's unlikely that people will be searching for items that do
_not_ have pictures, so the two respective checkboxes on the left can be
safely collapsed into one - "only with picture(s)".

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BenS
I would like to see thumbnail images. Ideally, as many as possible in a grid
with prices. The hard part browsing craigslist for me is clicking through to
see listings/products with images. The UI seems more optimized for non visual
browsing (e.g. airplane tickets).

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socratees
Definitely a good product. Google ads grab my attention right away - if
there's a way to make them blend in to the page, it would be cool. You should
try for individual sponsors rather than Google ads. Otherwise, the idea is
neat, and wish you all the best.

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latortuga
The biggest complaint I have about your site is that with a standard qwerty
layout, the entire domain is typed with the right hand except two letters (b
and the c in com). Maybe something easier to type? :P

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VonGuard
Rah on the simplicity. Well done, but I wish there were more sources to
search. I know those sources don't really exist, though, unless you're going
to scrape local newspaper sites and things like that.

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philjr
Firefox 3.0 on Ubuntu - search box on the results page is a little off:

<http://www.finetuna.com/grqdxt>

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thomaspaine
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.

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mishmax
Can't connect. "Connection was reset"...HN effect?

~~~
Oompa
I'm not seeing this, try refreshing.

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

~~~
kyro
Yeah, that's on the list.

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iterationx
what product would you search for on both craigslist & amazon, or craigslist &
amazon & ebay?

the sites are very separate for me, craigslist is for apartment hunting or
free junk i don't want, amazon for books, and ebay for some really niche
thing.

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

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jmonegro
it looks good, but instead of "picture available", I want to see the actual
picture in the search results.

~~~
Zarathu
Interesting suggestion.

Oompa, what do you think?

My initial concern would be the page getting overly cluttered with photos, or
the load time taking too long.

