

Show HN: AutoGlance is the Hipmunk for Used Car Searches - kapgoals
http://autoglance.com/search/#Acura,tl,50,10003

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zach
This is stupendous! I've done these kind of car searches many times and this
is a huge improvement. Seriously wish I had this for my last car search. Well
done!

\- The lineup and grouping by price, sort order and "worse deals" are all done
right. This is a pretty big deal. Congratulations.

\- The "generations" are excellent data to have. Great value for the user.

\- It would be nice to know that there is a real picture awaiting my rollover
or at least a disclaimer on stock photos if that's possible.

\- It's not clear that I should click on the car for more information. I
wanted at first to click on the bluish price on the rollover. Maybe just put a
little "click car for details" at the bottom of the rollover window.

\- Rounder mileage levels would really help. If there were tick marks on each
row for 25K increments, that would be the most help.

\- It would of course be nice to refine the search.

\- Sluggish like crazy at the moment, which I understand.

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zeratul
OP: Please note that you can fit a line that predicts price based on the
mileage (linear regression). For any car that the actual price is smaller than
the one predicted is a good deal - that's what you want to have most visible.
Obviously, you can use more variables for predicting the price, but the point
is that cars that deviate from the fitted curve are either a bad deal or a
good deal and that's where machine learning gives you monetary value on your
web service. You could make even one step further give API for other websites
to use your "bad deal"/"good deal" prediction engine and set your revenue this
way.

[EDIT] The more variables you add the more accurate your model can be. You
could even use NLP to extract the narrative about the car. You would disrupt
KBB, by providing more user friendly interface. It does not have to be the
visuals but just the fact that you can boil down the number of all cars that
sell down to a hand full number of cars that deviate from the fitted curve.
Even if you are not able to tell whether the deviation makes it a good or a
bad deal, you are selecting a smaller number of cars worth looking at than any
other website. At least you build a time sever which is worth money, too.

[EDIT2] I think I had an epiphany. The distance from the fitted curve is a
buyer's risk. Someone comes to your website and you ask what car and what
risk. Some people don't want a good deal, they want a fair deal; they want a
car that is priced just right. Others might venture to get cars that are
outliers, maybe those car have an engine modification or someone is in a rush
to sell. In any case you would have a criteria for searching cars that no one
has. KBB gives you the sound and fair deal prices but yours index could be
calculated in near-real-time and thus more accurate. All depends how you
implement regression model.

Note to self: excellent data mining application with interesting visualization

~~~
swombat
_the point is that cars that deviate from the fitted curve are either a bad
deal or a good deal_

And unfortunately, the direction of the deviation doesn't tell you which,
because some percentage of those deviating cars will have hidden issues that
more than make up for the price difference.

A killer disruption would be if every car seller was rated on customer
satisfaction based on the 12 months of car ownership following the sale.

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Nat0
This really distills the car search information down to exactly what I want.
Presented in such a way to where I get a feel for what the meta trends are, as
well as the best/worst deals (or other anomalies). Very nicely presented!

Feature Requests:

\- The ability to search for sub car models (Subaru Forester XT vs Subaru
Forester), it looks like some higher end models might be filtered as worse
deals at the moment.

\- It would also be nice to have a free text field to search for other misc
specific car features in the listings.

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Maro
The "X is the Y for Z" line only works if Y is really popular and the whole
analogy is easy to get.

In this case, I don't know what Hipmunk is...

~~~
swombat
Most people here do know what Hipmunk is, I think. Hint:
<http://www.hipmunk.com/>

~~~
squarecat
Do I have to go figure out what Hipmunk is the _____ of to understand it too?

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dmethvin
Great analogy. Wonderful presentation.

I've been using autotempest.com to search across several sources but it is
like rocks to a hammer when you compare the UI.

For rare makes (Triumph, Fiat, Delorean) I would like the ability to search
_only_ by make and for much larger radii. The only Fiat showing is the new
500, but there are plenty of older models available across the country.

~~~
kapgoals
We do indeed have the ability to do this, but we decided to temporarily
restrict some features to help ease the load on our server today (most notably
the maximum search radius of 200 miles).

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bengl3rt
Very cool! Not sure where the data is coming from, but no results near my ZIP
code (95129) for Acura NSX even though there are plenty on AutoTrader and
Craigslist.

Having attempted the creation of a number of flight search products I am
sympathetic how hard it is to get this sort of data - you either pay lots of
money for it or you screen-scrape. Ick.

But, overall, awesome!

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earlyriser
This is really great. As a suggestion I would put the prices rows (From 8K,
12K etc) outside of the grid and the grid will just contain information of the
current car, being easier to eye scan. X axis: Kms/miles Y axis: Price For the
tooltips saying ("14 cars that are worse..") that could be on the right side.
But not sure about this one.

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kapgoals
Sorry to all who are having issues using the site, our server is getting
killed right now. We're doing our best to keep the site running, here is a
screen shot in the mean time: <http://minus.com/m5EvCsoTv#1>

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timmaah
Nice work.

My suggestion would be the ability to add a simple tag next to each vehicle. I
could then scan the vehicles and mark which ones are off the list or I should
follow up on.

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tomandersen
In canada auto trader rules: they seem to have every car for sale listed, both
by dealers and private. Its nice to only go to one place, but will these data
owners pull out on you?

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switz
I select Make, then Model just holds on "Loading..."

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mlapida
Doesn't seem to work, at least in my area. I'm getting zero results on some
pretty common cars.

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PonyGumbo
Really neat interface, but all of the cars I clicked were no longer available.

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squarecat
What's the reason for not offering more scope limiters?

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gourneau
What is the hipmunk for car insurance again?

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mattwdelong
Do you have an email you can be reached at?

~~~
kapgoals
kapgoals (AT) gmail(dot) com

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asawilliams
unable to view the site

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rOnGMM
nice..saves lots of my time getting a good car :)

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jaequery
wow, this is awesome

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funkah
This is great! I am in the used market at the moment. But, I am not looking
for one specific make and model of car. I am trying to spend 4k or less and I
have some parameters like mileage, must have a clean title, etc. So, the
search experience is a bit too rigid -- most places where I can select one,
I'd like to select many. But the results display is way, way better than
anything I have used.

Lastly, I feel like a lot of cars (at least in the price range I'm looking)
are sold on craigslist, which isn't used as a source here, for good reason I'm
sure.

~~~
kapgoals
We are definitely going to tweak the interface to give the user more freedom
to do exactly what they want. What we've launched here is definitely an MVP,
there are a number of really great features that we're working on but didn't
feel ready to implement them at this point.

As for sources, we are definitely going to expand a lot; we felt that what we
have now was sufficient for launching.

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rorrr
I've been working on almost exactly the same project, and a very similar way
of displaying the best deals.

The main roadblock is not the UI, but the car data source. It looks like he is
parsing other sites, and displaying their data. This is illegal for most
sites, unless he uses their API or has a deal with them.

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gcb
What data are you using?

...sorry if there's a faq, still offline

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gcb
What data are you using?

~~~
kapgoals
At the moment we're just scraping. Hopefully we can get some APIs worked out
in the near future.

