
I built a private car sales search engine. Feedback appreciated - slowporch
https://hiddenrides.com
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bko
Nice site.

Few design notes that I think would spruce it up a bit:

1\. Search: Enter keyword(s) \- on my default window it was cut-off slightly.
I think you can drop the "Enter"

2\. Min/Max Price/Miles is the same issue. Since its under Price and Miles you
should consider just using min/max

3\. Date(newest) drop the date. With newest/oldest/... date is implied

4\. Not a huge fan of the banner color/fade. I think a more flat color would
make it look less template-y

5\. I noticed the source is various forums. Some people may want to filter on
the forum type, but if there are too many I would understand a filter may be
impractical

6\. When you select something from a drop-down it should automatically update
the search

7\. Make your About Us less generic. It feels very anonymous. I understand if
you may not want to share your name but consider sharing more information.
Like who is us? How many people are working on it? When was it built? Where
are you based? If it felt more personal, people would be more likely to give
their email. Also more information about what the newsletter looks like, how
often and an assurance that emails will not be sold.

Hidden Rides about us:

> About Hidden Rides 100% Free Started by car enthusiasts for car enthusiasts.
> We felt the pain of combing through forum threads to find gems that we would
> have never found otherwise spending hours every week checking up on the
> newest listings. Everyday, Hidden Rides aggregates classified listings from
> auto enthusiast forums so you can easily browse the secondary market of
> peer-to-peer car sales. Questions/comments/concerns? Contact us.

~~~
slowporch
Wow - thank you! really appreciate the detailed feedback.

1-4, 6: noted, will keep in mind for the next update.

5: yeah i have been asked this a few times as well, we are pulling from a
growing list (200+ forums), so might not be the most user friendly. I think
brand/manufacturer works as a proxy.

7\. did not spend too much time on the copy, but maybe now its time to update!
great suggestions, will definitely adjust.

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unstatusthequo
Consider some way to avoid the $1 listing problem that plagues sites. That
price is nearly always just a gimmick to get attention or hit on most searches
rather than be a real offer.

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wizzerking
I don't know about anyone else, but searching just in California is not nearly
a small enough distance. How about miles from a zipcode, and/or miles from a
city center ??

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cue232s
Your parser is misinterpreting some information. I clicked on a R8 and that is
showing as $29,000 when in fact the mileage is 29,000.

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stephen82
I came here to comment the same.

The mileage is displayed as the price and the price as mileage.

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squirrelicus
As a Utahn I have the, what I presume is rare, privilege of using a local
classifieds site that literally every Utahn also uses. It's run by local news
agency KSL (the SL is for Salt Lake)

[https://www.ksl.com/auto/](https://www.ksl.com/auto/)

Given this plus local dealerships I don't imagine that I would ever use a
disruptor's product due to the basically 100% relevant market penetration and
strong history of continued success of KSL's site.

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FlyingAvatar
\- "Man. Region" is non-intuitive, would recommend "Made In" or something
similar

\- Some states are big, some are small, distance from ZIP code would be more
practical than just state.

\- Would do some monitoring of the hit rate of some of the UI features to see
if they're actually useful. (i.e Will someone really ever want to specify a
filter for minimum number of miles, or do sort by the higher number of miles)

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programmarchy
Looks good on mobile which is nice. Clicked on a link for a Maserati which
took me to a forum post from 2007, so seems like there’s some stale data...

~~~
slowporch
thanks man - is that the 2009 silver GT sport?

i think the user created his profile in 2007. listing is from today.

~~~
programmarchy
Ah, yep, you're right. Well, your search engine is certainly better at parsing
that forum layout than I was :)

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pmiller2
Nice interface, but I agree with the other poster who says it needs a more
fine-grained geographical search. Also, I’m sure the only car under $10K in
California isn’t a 1975 Corvette that needs work.

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slowporch
fine tuned geo search is something im looking into atm. trying to figure out
if its a nice to have, versus a need to have feature - as it will take a ton
of work on the back end.

thanks for the cali example, yes, that does not sound right to me. i think ill
have to expand the scope of the sources to include more "affordables" (under
10k). the sweet spot is really in the 15k-50k range.

~~~
pmiller2
It depends. If you're looking for a project car or a very specialized kind of
car, then searching by state is okay. If you're like me and looking for a car
to drive around, I'm probably not going to go more than an hour away from
where I live to find one.

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scottwernervt
Please add a filter for automatic vs manual transmission.

Bonus if you do machine learning on pictures of manuals and automatically flag
idiot dealers who list automatic as manual.

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scrumper
This is great! Forum search is genius, well done.

Let me search by year.

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slowporch
ty sir. year search on the todo list

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Kagerjay
This is a really nice design

How are you populating the data? are you scraping forums and grabbing pictures
or curating it manually?

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bgdkbtv
So how does it work? Does it scrape a specified number of sites and forums for
content?

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klez
Preliminary bug report: selecting EU as a region keeps giving me US states as
locations.

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FlyingAvatar
This confused me too. The site is US only. The region is for the manufacturer
of the car. i.e. Wanting to look for European cars vs US-made, etc.

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IronWolve
Didnt seem to work for me, unable to find trucks or buicks on my searches.

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AuzzieStig
Site looks nice, would love something like this for Australia

~~~
slowporch
:) looking into potentially expanding into regions. AU has a great supra
forum...

tough thing at this point is gauging demand but as long as i keep getting the
ask - something to consider

