You agree not to post, email, or otherwise make available Content:
...
u) use automated means, including spiders, robots, crawlers, data mining tools, or the like to download data from the Service - unless expressly permitted by craigslist;
I am wondering if you already have permission from craigslist?
I make a point of flagging the various companies that occasionally appear here with scheme for violating craiglist TOS.
In this instance, all the ads that I tried to click-through to had been removed already - which shows one good reason for Craiglist not allowing this stuff.
I have heard -- anecdotally, at least -- that while that TOS exists, CL practically enforces this if you're (a) straining the site and/or (b) using it for commercial purposes that seem to go against the spirit of CL. [Hence, neat things like Padmapper, the author of which is really like the nicest guy based on limited interactions.]
(Disclosures: I read this a few years ago for another project, and I also happen to know one of the developers of this site.)
Hey all - we built this because we really like buying off craigslist vs dealerships. Its still pretty new but we'd love to know how we could make it better, so any and all comments are much appreciated. Thanks!
Please change the location selector to allow Canadian locations and searching on the Canadian craigslist sites. Other than that shortcoming, pretty great as far as I'm concerned.
I used www.autotempest.com late last year to find my latest car and I'm glad to see some competition emerging.
After a quick review, two things that strike me:
1. One feature I like about AT is being about to see which cars are in which markets. Even though the search radius may include 5 surrounding cities, it would be nice to see some physical separation between the markets when combing through the results.
2. One feature I DIDN'T like about AT is that in trying to accomplish [1] from above, I often found myself annoyed when nothing was found in specific markets. This resulted in me having to click through the pagination to see if anything existed in other markets. The better way to handle this would have been to show only those cities with results, in order.
Interesting market, with probably a lot of emerging competition from players who understand how to get listing inventory and make interesting insights about the "value" of each listing. This is something we're testing at FindTheBest with our Cars For Sale section (http://buy-a-car.findthebest.com/). We've got a lot of the same functionality that Carsabi has, but we don't scrape Craigslist for our data. In addition, we can also show how an individual car for sale compares to similar cars in terms of price, mileage, etc. on detailed pages. For example, I know that this 2012 Audi A3 is selling for $2,000 less than the average for all other 2012 Audi A3's for sale now on our site (http://buy-a-car.findthebest.com/l/280922/2012-Audi-A3). And with hundreds of thousands of listings, this data starts to be reliable. Also can show for some cars, how they were reviewed by experts (with no effort from the posting user), by relating cars for sale with cars we've reviewed on our cars section (cars.findthebest.com). Glad there are a lot of people interested in disrupting this market though - there's a lot more we can do to help users find a great car to buy.
This looks fantastic! Reminds me of padmapper, for cars.
I'm really liking some of the things you've done to parse out information into a more digestible/searchable format. The dynamic filters, mousing-over-to-see-different-images, and allowing me to 'favorite' listings makes this a godsend compared to manual craigslist-surfing. Have you considered searching by color? I know this won't be easy to parse out but perhaps image recognition would be more reliable?
Ya, adding color search is definitely on our roadmap. It'll be pretty easy for dealership cars, since they usually list it, and for Craigslist hopefully some blob detection will work.
This is great. Just literally gave up searching CL for a new car after ten minutes of click/back/click/back and saw this here. Timing couldn't be better, and it's quite intuitive.
* There is no way to get back to the home screen. If I want a blank slate I have to manually clear out the fields.
* I can't bookmark searches, send them to friends or search for multiple models at the same time because everything is cookie based. Having my search from my last session come up when I enter http://www.carsabi.com/ is also a bit creepy.
* Clearing the "max price" field is broken. All future searches come back with zero results. Refreshing the page shows "$0" in the field.
Ah yes, looks like we need to set some kind of sensible default for the maximum price.
Would you prefer to just bookmark searches, or login and be able to "save" them? (have them show up as separate tabs next to Saved Listings, or something like that)
Part of the problem with this is that nearly all of the best deals I've found on Craigslist (mostly camera lenses) were because the person actually misspelled the one key word in the title, which lead me to be the only person (or one of very few) who noticed the listing.
So I do hope that "Mazda Miata" also looks for listings without the word "Mazda" and also looks for the misspelled "Maita", etc, as well
I purchased my 4Runner like this. 3 reposts over a month with "4 Runner" and dropped the price $1500 each time. He needed to sell it fast. I got a really good deal.
For "car guys" you need to allow searching by the platform code. Way more important and specific than the decade-spanning model names. For example "e30" should return '83-91 BMW 3 Series.
Love that you can specify Slushbox/Manual and exclude salvage titles.
Very annoying that middle-clicking car posting titles on the 'grid view' page does not open the cars in new tabs. I want to scan through the list and open all the ones I find interesting, then look through the details one at a time.
Clicking the site's logo (top left) should bring you back to the no-current-search homepage. Not edit the current search. Right now it feels as if you can't entirely clear the search. Clicking back to the homepage should definitely do that.
I use this site for a list of desirable year/model cars. You might get a few ideas from them: http://autoemu.com/
shoot - yeah, we were sort of undecided on how to do this. Would you prefer a full tab in the browser or a tab within the webpage to see the car details? Obviously our current bootstrap modal isn't capable of this, but once we've added some pricing statistics we're going to shift to probably one of the above formats. Thanks for the feedback!
I'd like to see query parameters stored in the URL instead. As others have mentioned, it'd be nice to be able to bookmark pages and you currently can't. In addition to the bookmarking use case, I'd want to be able to email links to the results (e.g., so my dad could check them out).
It was also initially confusing to return to the homepage to find my past query, not the search form. Even if you don't get around to embedding search parameters in URL right away, consider adding a clear button to erase all of my input and let me start fresh.
More of a nitpick, but when I made a typo on my zip code on the main page and hit submit, it also erased my entry for the search box. The form data should be persisted even if there is an error, and the problem input should be highlighted in red or something.
You created a really nice site. Unfortunately, if you have any success CL will make legal moves to shut you down as they did with NotifyWire (which I created).
My software actually reduced server load on CL's servers when compared to the alternative (everyone using an RSS reader to do the same thing). So don't believe the BS about server load, they want complete control.
If you want to talk about what happened, send me an email [email protected]
Very useful. When I bought my Honda '92 on Craigslist, I was optimizing for cost and therefore spent a few weeks just feeling out the price range for model, mileage, and title (I was only looking at clean titles). It seems that the search settings here do a good job covering what my primary focus was.
In order to jump on the hottest deals, I would set up an IFTTT condition to email me when new queries were posted on Craigslist. Would be cool to have some monitoring with this site.
Nice job. Suggestion: specify what format you expect for the "Near" field. It took me a few tries to realize it wanted a ZIP code (and all the while it was telling me to "match the requested format").
Also, did you get permission from craigslist to index their listings? I was looking into building something like this, but their terms said something along the lines of "don't access our site with a crawler unless we give you permission".
Thanks! I think we'll try to link directly to google geocoding later, but for now I'll definitely add zipcode placeholder text.
As to Craigslist - we'll see? We actually built a pretty robust classification engine that you can run on any html, so we've added about 600 dealerships in California and are planning on running the crawler on dealerships nationally soon if we can get more server money. I think we're hoping that if we provide a free service where you can see what better deals Craigslist has compared to Autotrader etc people will generally think its cool instead of lame. Thanks for checking us out!
This is awesome, but maybe consider persisting some basic parameters in the URL string so that I can bookmark a particular page that I like to check often?
1. Yeah, pretty much everybody today told us to make tabs work. Going to add for sure
2. Hadn't thought of saving searches (not listings) yet, great idea
3. Damn! My js skills suck, will debug
3. I'll check with Edmunds if they have an API, that could be cool. In the mean time we were going to add some stats about how any car compares to others nationally with the same model, year, and mileage
Love it! Searching on value feels like it'd be useful for a trader, but not necessarily an individual with a strict price limit. How about adding a value measure to the boxes? Then users could sort by price but still pick out the real bargains.
Also would be nice to search for several models together and/or criteria rather than models (e.g. "manual hatchback between $7 and $10k").
Definitely, we'd like to add more comparison as to how good of a deal you're getting, but just haven't had time yet.
The hatchback/sedan/... is on our roadmap too. It's a little tricky, because often sellers don't post it explicitly, and doing computer vision on the pictures, would be very hard.
pretty good, although for craigslist, there is really no sense in letting someone search within 14 days.
anything that's a good deal is gone almost right away
I lost out on like a dozen cars before I bought my last one. And that was only because I saw the ad get listed in the previous 5 minutes, and went right away to test drive it.
As far as feedback, 1 bug - when you scroll through the makes, it keeps hiding. Especially annoying if it's a brand at the bottom of the list(i.e. Mercedes).
Feature wise, the map of the car's location isn't that useful, much better would be to just list how many miles away the person is...and maybe even estimate the time to get there.(i.e. I remember thinking oh 30 miles, not that bad...then you spend 45 minutes driving to and from there, and pretty much your entire day is gone, just to see one car)
Yeah, this is totally true. I think we'll be adding a notification system with saved searches soon, but we wanted to see if anyone liked the idea at all first.
Also with the 14 days thing - we're trying to build something that can crawl dealership websites as well, and are hoping to have this going nationally sometime soon. The entire idea is that Autotrader sucks and basically raises the prices for everyone while presenting a shitty interface - for things as large and expensive as cars I think the internet could literally track all instances available, allowing a rational decision process behind purchasing sans prioritization of pre-existing distribution channels or advertising budgets
This has some similarity to Autoglance (which is more Hipmunk-like in its UI, currently does not include craigslist data, but does allow searching by color) posted here a few days ago:
[+] [-] senthil_rajasek|14 years ago|reply
7. CONDUCT
You agree not to post, email, or otherwise make available Content: ...
u) use automated means, including spiders, robots, crawlers, data mining tools, or the like to download data from the Service - unless expressly permitted by craigslist;
I am wondering if you already have permission from craigslist?
[+] [-] joe_the_user|14 years ago|reply
In this instance, all the ads that I tried to click-through to had been removed already - which shows one good reason for Craiglist not allowing this stuff.
[+] [-] daguar|14 years ago|reply
I have heard -- anecdotally, at least -- that while that TOS exists, CL practically enforces this if you're (a) straining the site and/or (b) using it for commercial purposes that seem to go against the spirit of CL. [Hence, neat things like Padmapper, the author of which is really like the nicest guy based on limited interactions.]
(Disclosures: I read this a few years ago for another project, and I also happen to know one of the developers of this site.)
[+] [-] juiceandjuice|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rorrr|14 years ago|reply
http://newyork.craigslist.org/search/cta?query=nissan&sr...
[+] [-] jzawodn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dw5ight|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aditij|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lowlevel|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deltaqueue|14 years ago|reply
After a quick review, two things that strike me:
1. One feature I like about AT is being about to see which cars are in which markets. Even though the search radius may include 5 surrounding cities, it would be nice to see some physical separation between the markets when combing through the results.
2. One feature I DIDN'T like about AT is that in trying to accomplish [1] from above, I often found myself annoyed when nothing was found in specific markets. This resulted in me having to click through the pagination to see if anything existed in other markets. The better way to handle this would have been to show only those cities with results, in order.
Good work so far!
[+] [-] arosenberg|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrmaddog|14 years ago|reply
Well done!
[+] [-] raccoonone|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conipto|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] underwater|14 years ago|reply
* There is no way to get back to the home screen. If I want a blank slate I have to manually clear out the fields.
* I can't bookmark searches, send them to friends or search for multiple models at the same time because everything is cookie based. Having my search from my last session come up when I enter http://www.carsabi.com/ is also a bit creepy.
* Clearing the "max price" field is broken. All future searches come back with zero results. Refreshing the page shows "$0" in the field.
[+] [-] raccoonone|14 years ago|reply
Would you prefer to just bookmark searches, or login and be able to "save" them? (have them show up as separate tabs next to Saved Listings, or something like that)
[+] [-] simonsarris|14 years ago|reply
So I do hope that "Mazda Miata" also looks for listings without the word "Mazda" and also looks for the misspelled "Maita", etc, as well
[+] [-] ChaseB|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pguzmang|14 years ago|reply
It is missing a model :(
[+] [-] pkamb|14 years ago|reply
For "car guys" you need to allow searching by the platform code. Way more important and specific than the decade-spanning model names. For example "e30" should return '83-91 BMW 3 Series.
Love that you can specify Slushbox/Manual and exclude salvage titles.
Very annoying that middle-clicking car posting titles on the 'grid view' page does not open the cars in new tabs. I want to scan through the list and open all the ones I find interesting, then look through the details one at a time.
Clicking the site's logo (top left) should bring you back to the no-current-search homepage. Not edit the current search. Right now it feels as if you can't entirely clear the search. Clicking back to the homepage should definitely do that.
I use this site for a list of desirable year/model cars. You might get a few ideas from them: http://autoemu.com/
[+] [-] dw5ight|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshu|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelschade|14 years ago|reply
I'd like to see query parameters stored in the URL instead. As others have mentioned, it'd be nice to be able to bookmark pages and you currently can't. In addition to the bookmarking use case, I'd want to be able to email links to the results (e.g., so my dad could check them out).
It was also initially confusing to return to the homepage to find my past query, not the search form. Even if you don't get around to embedding search parameters in URL right away, consider adding a clear button to erase all of my input and let me start fresh.
More of a nitpick, but when I made a typo on my zip code on the main page and hit submit, it also erased my entry for the search box. The form data should be persisted even if there is an error, and the problem input should be highlighted in red or something.
[+] [-] IanDrake|14 years ago|reply
You created a really nice site. Unfortunately, if you have any success CL will make legal moves to shut you down as they did with NotifyWire (which I created).
My software actually reduced server load on CL's servers when compared to the alternative (everyone using an RSS reader to do the same thing). So don't believe the BS about server load, they want complete control.
If you want to talk about what happened, send me an email [email protected]
[+] [-] lambtron|14 years ago|reply
In order to jump on the hottest deals, I would set up an IFTTT condition to email me when new queries were posted on Craigslist. Would be cool to have some monitoring with this site.
Regardless, very nice work!
[+] [-] kasrak|14 years ago|reply
Also, did you get permission from craigslist to index their listings? I was looking into building something like this, but their terms said something along the lines of "don't access our site with a crawler unless we give you permission".
[+] [-] dw5ight|14 years ago|reply
As to Craigslist - we'll see? We actually built a pretty robust classification engine that you can run on any html, so we've added about 600 dealerships in California and are planning on running the crawler on dealerships nationally soon if we can get more server money. I think we're hoping that if we provide a free service where you can see what better deals Craigslist has compared to Autotrader etc people will generally think its cool instead of lame. Thanks for checking us out!
[+] [-] bengl3rt|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gleb|14 years ago|reply
Main feedback - browser refresh, back/forward, tabs, middle-click should work, e.g.
- refresh now loses half the state (why half?)
- opening 'Click to view listing' messes up state (loses saved)
- want to be able to middle click on 'Details' to open in new tab
Nice to have: integration with Edmunds to appraise the car
[+] [-] dw5ight|14 years ago|reply
thanks!
[+] [-] blueski|14 years ago|reply
Also would be nice to search for several models together and/or criteria rather than models (e.g. "manual hatchback between $7 and $10k").
Good luck!
[+] [-] raccoonone|14 years ago|reply
The hatchback/sedan/... is on our roadmap too. It's a little tricky, because often sellers don't post it explicitly, and doing computer vision on the pictures, would be very hard.
[+] [-] dreadsword|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|14 years ago|reply
1. didn't work for me until I realized I have to enable cookies?
2. how do I search for any kind of hatchback?
3. did my scrollbar just turn pink in chrome? really? Are we back in the 1990s with IE ?
4. be sure to get permission BEFORE you start crawling them:
http://www.google.com/search?q=craigslist+sues
[+] [-] daguar|14 years ago|reply
It'd be super neat to associate that may not be explicit in your fields or the source CL data with certain make/models.
[+] [-] vaksel|14 years ago|reply
anything that's a good deal is gone almost right away
I lost out on like a dozen cars before I bought my last one. And that was only because I saw the ad get listed in the previous 5 minutes, and went right away to test drive it.
As far as feedback, 1 bug - when you scroll through the makes, it keeps hiding. Especially annoying if it's a brand at the bottom of the list(i.e. Mercedes).
Feature wise, the map of the car's location isn't that useful, much better would be to just list how many miles away the person is...and maybe even estimate the time to get there.(i.e. I remember thinking oh 30 miles, not that bad...then you spend 45 minutes driving to and from there, and pretty much your entire day is gone, just to see one car)
[+] [-] dw5ight|14 years ago|reply
Also with the 14 days thing - we're trying to build something that can crawl dealership websites as well, and are hoping to have this going nationally sometime soon. The entire idea is that Autotrader sucks and basically raises the prices for everyone while presenting a shitty interface - for things as large and expensive as cars I think the internet could literally track all instances available, allowing a rational decision process behind purchasing sans prioritization of pre-existing distribution channels or advertising budgets
Also will fix the make thing. Thanks!!!
[+] [-] gcb|14 years ago|reply
in all that time i was still "searching" craigslist, and I could see the same cars over and over. A few were fast, of course.
[+] [-] jaredsohn|14 years ago|reply
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3484875