

Show HN: MotoMiner – Web search engine for vehicle classifieds - motominer
https://motominer.com/

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johndubya1
Looks pretty useful. Seems to have more vehicles available than Cars.com or
Autotrader. For instance, when searching for new Ford Focuses within 50 miles
of 90210, Cars.com found 739, AutoTrader found 682, and MotoMiner found 848.
So if you guys are just starting out, that's impressive. The site is also
really simple, which is nice. No bloat, no ads...just give me the vehicles I
want to see. Would be nice to be able to save my searches across devices.
Anyway, nice job!

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motominer
Saving searches across devices would require user accounts for persisting of
values across browsers/sessions. Initial feedback from peers suggested that
they didn't want another system to log into. Given this, phase 1, we decided
to persist saved and recent searches via browser local storage. We hope to add
abilities for users to login and create their own personal vehicle classified
pages and persist their searches across devices in the near future.

Thanks for the feedback!

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motominer
We created a search engine which indexes vehicles found on over 100-thousand
car dealership websites. MotoMiner's highly innovative approach has yielded
more vehicles to search on than Cars.com and AutoTrader. It is a great tool to
use if you want to find great deals without having to sift through a lot of
websites on your own. It's like Google but for vehicle classifieds. Let us
know what you think. Thanks!

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nerdhard
You would get more response here if you include more information about the
project. Who is "we"? What is the business model? Are there really more then
100000 car dealership sites? How did you find them? Are you allowed to use the
photos and infos from those sites?

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motominer
Thanks for your response.

"We" = the MotoMiner team. We wanted to create a real web search engine (like
Google) but for cars. Other sites let you search on their listings which are
acquired through manual import/export processes. Some of these sites also
require dealerships to pay them money to be listed on them. MotoMiner has no
entry barriers. Its automated processes to monitor/mine the web for vehicle
classifieds are free and yield a more comprehensive dataset to search on.

Other listing sites will not let the buyer/visitor navigate to the original
vehicle classified page on the auto dealership's website. They do this so they
can capture the buyers information and resell it to the seller/dealer or make
dealers subscribe to their services. This process frustrates both buyers and
sellers. MotoMiner's visitors are able to search on the data and navigate
directly to the original page to which the vehicle was found. The process is
more transparent and the buyer can deal directly with the seller.

Yes, there are over 100,000 car dealership websites. Some of them are
inactive, some redirect, some sellers have multiple websites with the same
cars. MotoMiner indexes data from all of them and we run de-dupe & cleaning
processes on it.

MotoMiner's objective is to help buyers find cars more efficiently. MotoMiner
also helps the sellers (often car dealerships) by getting them more exposure
for free. We index a handful of data points per page (we don't scrape the page
and reshow it as our own). These indexed data points are used so visitors can
search on them and find the vehicle detail page they'd want to go to.

As to how we identify what websites, what pages to index, how we extract data
points... those are trade secrets.

Our business model is like other search engines. MotoMiner presents a new and
improved way that buyers want to search for cars. We will allow for sellers to
be able to promote their vehicles in an unobtrusive way. When you search
Google, the first 1-3 results may be an Ad that is pertinent for what you
searched on. MotoMiner can do the same. For instance, if you searched on a
Ford F-150 near zip code 12345, a local Ford dealership may be paying to
promote their vehicles and so their Ford F-150's may show up in the first 1-3
results.

The "About" page on MotoMiner's website may help shed light on what we are all
about. [https://motominer.com/About](https://motominer.com/About)

Hope this helps. Thanks for the feedback.

