

Show HN: New way to search for used cars (my weekend project) - oleg_kikin
http://www.olegkikin.com/car_search/
Each dot on the chart is a car.<p>Horizontal scale = mileage.<p>Vertical scale = price.<p>The size of a dot = year (newer = larger), plus I colored 2007 .. 2011 in different colors to find "fresh" cars quicker.<p>This is just some sample data from the last 24 hours, relatively cheap cars under $32,000 within 500 mile radius of NYC.
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jackpirate
I like the visualization. This could be a great way to visualize if you're
getting a good deal or getting ripped off.

Four things:

1\. I don't see a way to change my location. Without that, the tool is
essentially useless to anyone but you.

2\. It's not obvious what the colors or sizes of the dots represent.

3\. Have you considered superimposing Kelly Blue Book info? That could add
some interesting trend lines.

4\. A blog post analyzing how well different brands retain their value could
be a great way to drive traffic. I imagine their might actually be some money
in adwords around used cars.

~~~
oleg_kikin
Each dot on the chart is a car.

Horizontal scale = mileage.

Vertical scale = price.

The size of a dot = year (newer = larger), plus I colored 2007 .. 2011 in
different colors to find "fresh" cars quicker.

This is just some sample data from the last 24 hours, relatively cheap cars
under $32,000 within 500 mile radius of NYC.

~~~
b2spirit
Where did you find the used car data?

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oleg_kikin
Downloaded 20 search results pages from cars.com. I wish I had direct access
to their DB.

Craigslist has a ton of car postings, but it's not structured in any way, will
be very hard to parse.

~~~
msluyter
Heh. My company provides cars.com with most of its data, so _I_ have direct
access to their db. ;) However, because our business model is predicated on
aggregating and then reselling automotive data, it's unlikely you could get
access for free. Still, if you think you'll ever want to go commercial, you
might contact us: (DMI) Digital Motorworks Inc.

~~~
msellout
Listings are valuable. I know AutoTrader.com works hard to protect its
listings from mass downloading.

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revorad
This is fantastic. I'm working on something similar for other product
categories. One rule of thumb I'm going by is to show as few results to the
user as possible. Shopping sites often offer so much choice that the user is
too paralysed to make a decision.

I'd change the default setting from showing all brands to 2-3 at most. Simple
sliders to narrow down the price and mileage range would improve the usability
a lot. Plus, if you're presenting any information as shape, colour or size,
you need to show a key which explains what it means.

You've done remarkably well to put this up in a weekend. I need to pull my
socks up and release my v1 asap.

Good luck!

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jmatt
There's a 2005 Bentley Continental GT for $29,800. Seems like a good buy. I
think someone forgot a zero?

[http://www.cars.com/go/search/detail.jsp?tracktype=usedcc...](http://www.cars.com/go/search/detail.jsp?tracktype=usedcc&csDlId=&csDgId=&listingId=72195272&listingRecNum=4763&criteria=sf1Dir%3DASC%26ldNmb%3D1%26rd%3D500%26crSrtFlds%3DfeedSegId-
ldId%26zc%3D10001%26rn%3D4750%26PMmt%3D0-0-0%26sf2Dir%3DASC%26sf1Nm%3Dprice%26sf2Nm%3Dmiles%26isDealerGrouping%3Dfalse%26ldId%3D28882%26rpp%3D250%26feedSegId%3D28705&aff=national)

Your app made it easy enough to find an exception like this.

~~~
joelhaasnoot
There's also several cars for $299, but in the description are $2990 down...

~~~
coreyja
Thats cause thats how they are classified on cars.com. Can't blame the
developer. He scrapped the data correctly just some smart ass marketing guy
who put up the ads cheated...

~~~
true_religion
Dealing with bad data sources is like product development 101. You're not
supposed to "blame" the developer, but pointing it out and expecting a fix is
fair.

It's a weekend project, but even weekend projects evolve with free time.

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robinduckett
I have to be honest here, whilst technically this is very good, from a
customer's perspective and from a "person what works in the industry"
perspective, I feel this isn't the best. It's certainly new, but that doesn't
mean the user experience is any good.

I agree that the standard "pick a make and model and hope for the best" kind
of search is in dire need of an update, but I don't have the UX design
experience or even the creativity to invent a new way of doing it, but what I
do know, is what currently works, and what doesn't.

Instant feedback on the search as you are performing it is cool, and I've
recently worked on a system that feeds back to the user the amount of cars
that are going to be returned by their selected criteria as they select them,
and it works pretty well and looks great, degrades nicely and allows someone
to make a quick judgement about how broad or narrow their search is on the
fly.

I'd like to see a new way to search for used cars that merges this level of
visual detail with the standard selection criteria based way of searching, and
hopefully something great can grow out of that, but until then, mixing up the
interface like this will just confuse people.

Apart from my qualms, I do think this is pretty excellent and daring, but not
really practical at the current time.

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fuzzythinker
Very nice! To make it even better, draw an imaginary arc from upper left
corner to lower right corner and filter out all the "noise" ("Worst" data)
from the graph, then stretch the data within the arc to fill the filtered
empty space. That way, the dots won't be cluttered and thus more user
friendly. You can put a foot note about the avg & "worst" data point filtered.

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phreeza
Interestingly, it looks a lot like a Pareto optimal curve that is being
optimized for maximum value to the seller, not the buyer.

~~~
archangel_one
Which would make sense since the seller sets the asking price. We don't know
how much each car is actually going to sell for - presumably the buyers have
more influence on that curve.

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dkokelley
What a great start! I think this has the potential to be a powerful tool for
future car buyers. It will need some work first.

The user interaction will be confusing to many. Legends, instructions, and a
general UI cleanup will help lots. Another thing to consider is adding more
search parameters (year, model, price range, body style, location, source,
etc.). I'm sure you've already got all of this in the development pipeline.

If you gave this a little polish and its own memorable domain name, I would
almost certainly use this tool to research my next car. Also, car buyers are a
significant demographic to car manufacturers. I could see this being a
valuable resources for buyers and sellers (of new cars) alike.

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joelhaasnoot
One thing is that for some reason I'm expecting the good deals to be in the
top right hand corner, most bang-for-the-buck charts work that way, while your
graph shows it in the top left corner, it's slightly confusing that way.

~~~
coreyja
Actually the 'most bang-for-the-buck' on his graph is the lower left corner
not the upper left.

I agree that it is kinda strange at first but once I realized it, it wasn't
that bad.

~~~
joelhaasnoot
Ah, see, confused me even more. Might have something to do with the green
coloring, green = better, yet it's related to the car's year.

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pyrhho
Desperately needs some sort of legend (at leas for the colors). I thought
Fords were Purple, but then found some yellow, and some pink fords, and was
thoroughly confused as to what the color was representing.

~~~
dkokelley
Year, I believe.

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stef25
Very cool! How are you generating the graph, if you don't mind me asking? I'm
using Google Charts for something similar.

EDIT: ok seems to be <http://raphaeljs.com/>

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keyle
Pretty cool, would be nice to be able to click right on the spot to the open a
new tab with the cars.com page.

Would also be useful to change location.

Also to drill down by model / year. etc.

But for a week-end project, congrats.

~~~
irfn
Indeed. search features/ drill down would be useful

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mapster
Is the idea to separate the wheat from the chaff? For a good deal, my eye
tends to look away from the cluster and find outliers, but these $399 or
leases not the asking price.

~~~
Triumvark
This same thing comes up in eBay, Craigslist...

Some court should declare that a headline is a real offer, and if someone
calls to accept, then it's a binding contract.

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bluehat
Pretty serious bug, I can't click any of the links because once I mouse off
the circle the link is gone and I'm focused on a different car. (Firefox and
Chrome on Linux)

~~~
oleg_kikin
Yeah, it looks like I will have to make the circles clickable.

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ComputerGuru
Amazing work. I can only say I wish I had this a month ago when I was
searching for a used car. (ended up with a 2005 A4 Special Edition w/ 95k
miles for 9k USD)

EDIT:

Would be great if we can add another dimension or at least switch one of the
axises to a different dataset - in particular, the year.

EDIT2:

I now realize the colors are the year. This addresses my previous concern, but
you need a legend for that.

EDIT3:

Scratch that - Colors are not year. I don't know what's going on.. but colors
as years would have been nice.

~~~
reemrevnivek
The OP said higher up that:

> The size of a dot = year (newer = larger), plus I colored 2007 .. 2011 in
> different colors to find "fresh" cars quicker.

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martin1b
Very nice! Really easy to visualize the data and find what you're looking for
without combing through hundreds of search results.

Couple of thoughts:

The colors are a bit confusing. I understand the year, but a legend might
help.

Would be cool to add search terms to limit models.

Would be nice to easily change location.

Other than that, really excellent idea and nice implementation!

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rokhayakebe
You have an algorithm that can classify cars from best to worse depending on a
lot of input. That is the money, not the visualization (although very cool).
The best to display ranking is a numbered list. Although not super cool, that
is very valuable.

~~~
reemrevnivek
There are cheap cars with low mileage, expensive cars with low mileage,
expensive cars with high mileage, and cheap cars with high mileage, and
everything in between. Unless the cheapest car also has the lowest mileage,
and the most expensive car also has the highest mileage, there is no "best" or
"worst" in this classification.

There is only a tradeoff between inputs, the two primary ones shown here are
mileage and price, with age overlaid by color/dot size.

2D data requires visualization and human interpretation - There is no
algorithm in place here. A list only works on 1 dimensional data (and can be
parsed trivially with a simple sort algorithm). 3D and higher dimension data
requires more complex visualization and more effort to parse.

A visualization allowing the user to make good decisions based on several
inputs is a great place to find 'the money'.

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yangyang
It would also be nice to have the option of using age instead of mileage, or
possibly miles / year.

Sometimes an old car that's hardly ever driven, with a low mileage, isn't as
good a bet as a newer car with lots of miles that's been well maintained.

~~~
msellout
That's true, but age is so strongly correlated with mileage that it's an
insignificant factor in sell-price once you control for mileage (Based on my
own research using proprietary data).

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dprice1
Keeping a historical trove of prices would also be really neat-- then you
could see what to expect.

It's cool, I would use it. I'd love to be able to set a range of mileage and
price, filter by model names, location, etc. etc.

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arepb
You should check out VAST or Oodle as data sources with an API to plot your
graph.

I really dig that you did here. I would only add that "Better" isn't always
the cheapest option.

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gsivil
Nice idea! The picture is already almost unusable while you have something
like 3300 cars featured. Do you have any thought on how to deal with that
problem?

~~~
oleg_kikin
Yeah, it's pretty busy with all of them together, but I assume that usually
people want a specific brand (and often a specific model of that brand). I
will add more filters soon - by year, location, model.

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brado86
Quick Suggestion: Could you add an option to slice by car model? People would
be more interested in looking for cars by brand+model than just brand.

~~~
oleg_kikin
Yes, I will add that.

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kennethologist
I like the visualization. Reminds me of Hans Rosling. Keep up the good work.
MAybe this kind of visualization can be applied to other areas.

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timc3
Really good stuff, would love to see this used on other sites as well such as
one that is local to Sweden.

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h6165
How do I click the "Link" for a car in the middle of the dot-cloud?

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icodestuff
Doesn't work in OmniWeb 5.10.3

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irfn
doesnt work in safari

~~~
oleg_kikin
I don't have access to OSX, it works on my Safari under Win7.

~~~
coreyja
This is what I got when I tried in Safari 5.05 under Snow Leopard. Not sure if
it helps since you can't test but here ya go. Also shows the errors I got in
the error log console.

[http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/3154/screenshot20110815at134....](http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/3154/screenshot20110815at134.png)

~~~
oleg_kikin
I think it didn't like the gzipped JS file with the data. Not sure why, pretty
much all modern browsers should support it.

~~~
AntiRush
Try naming the gzip file something else, like .js.jgz. Safari automatically
opens many archive types, including, I believe, gzip.

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stevederico
Looks Great. Reminds me of a hipmunk for cars.

