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Rate HN: Our site - Looklookbuy
39 points by kyro on Aug 12, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 44 comments
url - http://www.looklookbuy.com

Hey HN!

Two other HNers (Oompa and Zarathu) and I have gotten together to create Looklookbuy. We grew frustrated of having to jump from site to site, Craigslist to Amazon to eBay, etc, to find product prices. So we started work on Looklookbuy to hopefully alleviate some of those frustrations, in the hopes of others finding the service useful as well. We still have many things we'd like to implement, and are close to implementing, like more filtering options to help clean up the noise, and the ability to 'save' an ad via email. We do know that results can get a bit noisy and are working to change that, and are open to suggestions. We wanted to show you all what we had so far, and hope to use your feedback to make the site much better!

Some questions:

-Do you find it useful?

-What do you like/hate?

-What would you change?

-How would you increase the signal/noise ratio?

Some things we will be adding soon:

-Pagination

-Common words filter

-Saving ads via email

-More websites added to each product category

-More details regarding the individual product results

Thank you very much to those who will leave feedback/criticisms. We really value this community's opinions.

Follow us on Twitter @looklookbuy, if you wish.




You shouldn't require users to select category, that extra step is a huge pain in the ass for the user.

Overall its a decent looking site, but there are a ton of sites that do the same exact thing.

You need to figure out a way to differentiate yourself from all the other scrapers.


Clickable link: http://www.looklookbuy.com


A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, open the script in the debugger, or let the script continue.

Script: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.js:...

---

Why are the results loaded through javascript? can't they just be rendered server side?

I like the name.


It looks like the results are being loaded with independent ajax requests to each product database. If this was just all done server side, you'd have to wait until all of these requests finished loading instead of having them appear on the page incrementally. Most people don't want to wait 10 seconds for a page to load.


I see. But there must be something more to it, because an asynchronous request shouldn't lock up the browser. Maybe you could use the server as a proxy between the browser and the search-site. It would still load asynchronous, but it would be much swifter. That would also allow you to cache the results for common queries.


Because then the page response would take a few seconds. We figured this was undesirable.


Hmm, very nice. I like the layout, nice UI, very clean.

I would be nice if you tapped into some geolocation to provide my default location (let me change it of course) so I only had to fill in two fields (or possibly even one) to see some relevant results.

Congrats on launching, and I wish you the best of luck!


Also, permanently save whatever zipcode I enter (as a cookie or something), so that I don't have to retype it when I come back to the site at a later date.


Thanks!

Good suggestion about the geolocation, I really like it. I'll be sure to look into it.


You're not really allowed to search Craigslist, right?

Edit: I should add that I like what you guys have done. Congrats on launching.


Craigslist TOS says we are prohibited from using their data if we ourselves are providing classified services. I looked around and found that all sites that were asked to stop their use of Craigslist data were sites that were constantly scraping the site to populate their own database. The way we see it, a user searching on our site, and us querying CL, is no different than that user directly searching on CL. We're querying them per user search.


I just remember other sites (like Housingmaps.com) being exceptions because they were totally non-commercial. I didn't actually read their TOS until now. It looks like you're definitely in violation of their TOS.

They might not really care or notice unless you grow though.


I'm not sure that will stand for long:

http://crgslst.com/


Wow!! This is nice. I like the simplicity.

Can you please add an "All" for the category section? Sometimes I'd like to see all the results for a certain search term.

Instead of using the slider UI for the price range can we have text boxes, the slider is not very user-friendly when I am trying to pick a range of 0-300 when the whole range is 0-5000.


Awesome!

2nd on the 'All' selection in the categories (and have it default to it as well) and text boxes for price ranges. But maybe you can have the ranges auto-populate and just give us the ability to define the range if need be. Also starting it off at zero kinda throws my reaction to the search results since at zero the results would most likely not show the product I was searching for and instead return accessories, etc. You might want to have the prices default at midrange.

Otherwise, loving the layout and simplicity. Ya'll rocked it!


The all category seems interesting, we'll look into it.

We've been toying with this idea because of exactly the reason you mentioned. It's even worse if you search something and all the results are $0-$200 except for one that's $1000. We've also considered removing from the list the ones that are larger than a certain percentage of the average, to help keep the list more on target.


Nice use of ajax. The site feels very responsive.

Buuut I have to type in my zip code every single time? I'm too lazy (srs). You could always tie it to the session? The next step is to get hold of a geo-ip database.

In Camino, the "look!" button on the homepage is blank. You should use a button tag instead of an input tag. In fact, the whole header is broked in Camino.

The page headers look clickable, but aren't. Same with the table header on the list of blog posts.

Why are there separate electronics, computers, cell phones, and video games sections sections? Same with home and furniture. And wtf are events? You should add a better default category than "Apparel".

On the homepage, the "Just type in the product..." copy looks dense and misplaced. The copyright notice seems lost as well.

Definitely add photos if legally possible.

Haha that's plenty. Good luck guys!


Very cool!

To increase the signal/noise ratio, I'd love to specify that I'm looking for a product, and not accessories for a product. For example, I just searched for a camera I'm looking to buy. The first large set of results were accessories for that camera, and since they're cheaper than the camera itself, they showed up first.

Great start!


Yeah, this is one of the problems that we've been dealing with for a while, and we're still not sure how to really go about eliminating product accessories when the user is simply looking for that product.

Unfortunately, this comes up whenever you search websites like Craigslist or eBay, so without getting really creative, there's not a whole lot we can do to completely get rid of this problem.

I'm glad we were able to do it a little bit with cars and car parts.

Thanks for your feedback!


My camera test search query ended up getting good results after modifying it to "powershot -battery -cable -case -protector -charger -adapter"

Would it work to attach a "accessory word blacklist" to the end of every search query that does not explicitly have one of the accessory words in it?


I think we're going to have a list of common words found in the results that you can uncheck to remove the irrelevant results.


I had the same thing with accessories. It would be very useful if you could provide a button to remove an entry from the list and then all similar entries are automatically removed as well.


Yea I noticed that, but that's because the price range set by the slider starts at '0' so it shows the cheapest products first which would most usually be accessories or other related items but NOT the product itself.


Perhaps automatically filters to sane prices? If you search for iphone 3gs, first few pages are all really cheap (either accessories or have some catch associated with them), not particularly useful unless specifically requested.


This is typically because of eBay links, where the current bid is still $1.

As far as the outrageously high prices go (iPhones costing $4 million dollars and the like), I'm writing a formula to help get rid of those.


We're playing with the notion of letting people filter out based on a percentage away from the average price. That or doing it before we even put the results in the page.


Nice UI.

There is a bug on the price slider limits where there are no results, it shows "+/- Infinity".


Thanks for the heads up! I'll take a note of it and fix it tonight.


Thanks for reporting this!


When showing the search results display either "picture available" or "picture unavailable", but not both. The absence of one implies the presence of another. Also, it's unlikely that people will be searching for items that do not have pictures, so the two respective checkboxes on the left can be safely collapsed into one - "only with picture(s)".


I would like to see thumbnail images. Ideally, as many as possible in a grid with prices. The hard part browsing craigslist for me is clicking through to see listings/products with images. The UI seems more optimized for non visual browsing (e.g. airplane tickets).


Definitely a good product. Google ads grab my attention right away - if there's a way to make them blend in to the page, it would be cool. You should try for individual sponsors rather than Google ads. Otherwise, the idea is neat, and wish you all the best.


The biggest complaint I have about your site is that with a standard qwerty layout, the entire domain is typed with the right hand except two letters (b and the c in com). Maybe something easier to type? :P


Rah on the simplicity. Well done, but I wish there were more sources to search. I know those sources don't really exist, though, unless you're going to scrape local newspaper sites and things like that.


Are you doing anything like transforming the links into affiliate links? If that doesn't violate Amazon or whoever's TOS, it would be a good way to monetize.


Firefox 3.0 on Ubuntu - search box on the results page is a little off:

http://www.finetuna.com/grqdxt


Can't connect. "Connection was reset"...HN effect?


I'm not seeing this, try refreshing.


Adding support for http://www.kijiji.com/ would be nice.


Yeah, that's on the list.


what product would you search for on both craigslist & amazon, or craigslist & amazon & ebay?

the sites are very separate for me, craigslist is for apartment hunting or free junk i don't want, amazon for books, and ebay for some really niche thing.


I'd add this as a firefox search plug-in


it looks good, but instead of "picture available", I want to see the actual picture in the search results.


Interesting suggestion.

Oompa, what do you think?

My initial concern would be the page getting overly cluttered with photos, or the load time taking too long.




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