

Priceonomics (YC W12) Tells You What Everything is Worth - omarish
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/22/priceonomics/

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ilamont
How do startups get around the Craigslist TOU against using "automated means,
including spiders, robots, crawlers, data mining tools, or the like to
download data from the Service"
(<http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use>)?

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CoffeeDregs
You don't crawl Craigslist; you tickle Google. Craigslist can't block them...
But you'll still need an excellent lawyer...

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slig
I thought Google was heavily against automated searches and blocked bots on
spot.

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forensic
Seems like premature publicity. Great idea that is far from being useful right
now. If you actually want customers you need to prove you can provide value.

My first try was "iPhone 4" and it showed me the average price for all
iPhones, from iPhone originals to broken iPhones to locked iPhones etc. That's
useless. unless you can identify the specific product and give me a number,
this is not useful and I'm better off googling it

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omarish
Sorry, that isn't quite as clear as it could be. Here's a link to the page
you're looking for: <http://priceonomics.com/phones/apple/>

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forensic
Ah, so it's your search feature that is broken.

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omarish
Just pushed a fix. Thanks for your patience.

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jackpirate
Pushed a fix? He had a major critique of the way search works, not a minor bug
report. What could you really have changed in such a short time?

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patd
I don't know but before criticizing, you could just give it a try. Now
searching for "iPhone 4" suggests "Apple iPhone 4" and "Apple iPhone 4S".

If they fixed it in such a short time, it was probably a bug and they really
pushed a fix...

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cperciva
Your sorting by price is broken: It's sorting strings, not numbers, and counts
"$900" as being higher than "$2000".

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jrubinovitz
I went hunting for "macbook pro i7" and every item I clicked on (something
like 4 or 5) had already been sold. It does look like something I would use
otherwise(EDIT: as in if I had a better success rate when I clicked).

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omarish
Makes sense. We'll have fresher data up there in the very near term. Also,
it's not super obvious, but you can use the left and right arrows in that
lightbox to navigate the listings.

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adelevie
I remember when SeatGeek presented at TechCrunch Disrupt(?) in 2009, pg took
issue at the fact that they didn't use their ticket price data to arbitrage
the secondary ticket market. Does Pricenomics use its data to arbitrage any
markets, and if not, why should the same criticism not apply?

All that aside, Pricenomics looks compelling. Hopefully it will substantially
increase the efficiency of second hand "stuff" markets.

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rohin
We've been investigating arbitraging Aeron chairs. We're finding they're very
hard to lug around. We'll keep you posted!

~~~
adelevie
Haha. I thought you were being facetious until I saw it on your about page.
Now I'm not sure what to think :/

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zeratul
Note to self: data mining web app; few visual bugs; duplicates; I can see only
"Bad News! This Item Already Sold."; no info where an ad comes from; they use
jquery; actually <http://www.shopobot.com/> by nostromo looks better (but they
just focuse on amazon price monitoring);

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themenace
I think it's a great idea and wish these guys success. But isn't eBay (and
perhaps Craigslist) in a _much_ better position to provide this functionality?
They have enormous historical databases on the prices of things.

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veemjeem
wouldn't microsoft (bing), google, walmart, etc? I think this is why startups
exist...

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ryanglasgow
I searched 'iPod' and there were no results. Why would they launch a half-
baked website 3 days before Christmas? They should have admitted they missed
the holidays and polished things up before launching.

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omarish
Hey Ryan - that's my fault. I pushed some last minute fixes to handle the TC
traffic. Apple iPod works but iPod doesn't. We'll have to graduate to a proper
search tool at some point:

<http://priceonomics.com/search?s=apple+ipod>

Nonetheless, thanks for the feedback!

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Tichy
At first glance I didn't see anything that searching ebay with "show only
expired auctions" wouldn't also give me. But it is probably still early
days...

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nostromo
Congrats on the launch guys. We do something similar but for different online
markets -- most commonly Amazon -- (e.g.: <http://www.shopobot.com/tv/>). One
of our most common user requests is to provide this info for CraigsList and
Ebay, so I'm sure you'll find success there.

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richardburton
Cool! 'Macbook Air' did not return a result though :(

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omarish
Fixed! <http://priceonomics.com/search?s=macbook+air>

~~~
richardburton
Cool - thanks a lot!

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colinm
Price for EVERYTHING? But no commodities, oil, coffee, etc.

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rokhayakebe
I used to be "kind-of-a" used car dealer, and I always thought I could build
this same product to help get a better idea of how much to bid on cars at the
auction. Basically it would get current listings on CL in my city for model
ZYX from YY to YY. Knowing how many similar rides are on the market and the
average asking price is great insight.

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rorrr
So it's yet another price comparison site. What's so special about it?

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revorad
Do you guys actually have any products available or is this just an email
harvesting launch? I ask because I tried a lot of items and they were all sold
out. :-)

I'm impressed by your courage to launch with a half-baked product like this. I
wish I could do the same.

