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Comment by gcb | Hacker News Reader

my gripe with 90% of car searches.

i'm not after one specific car. i'm buying a used car.

i have a fixed budget and a some cars that I would avoid. everything else is fair game.

craigslist is the only one that get's it correct.

   1. put your price.
   2. get a bunch of crap you don't like
   3. add -crap1 to the search
   4. repeat 2 and 3 until you get things you like
   5. select a few, call, inspect, buy.

limiting by brand/model is like starting to shop by color.

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I've felt this same way for a while, I've been running a used car site since 1995 (http://www.ausedcar.com). The sad thing is I've experimented with all sorts of other ways to search for cars over the years like what you are recommending (in the past I've let you search by fuel economy, etc...) but nothing seems to convert (ie work) as well as the same convention everyone else uses of Make and Model :\.

Also Craigslist will probably shut down the linked site soon, it's quite unfortunate how Craigslist essentially took the entire FSBO car market, but won't innovate in the way that this site shows it could.

I can't agree more on the second point. If only they added mileage, year, make, model fields, this would instantly make car search painless.

What they have now is a bunch of unstructured data that users have to sift through.

CL is great, but the lack of innovation doesn't make any sense to me.

The unstructured data makes Craigslist a much easier place to post listings. I don't have to click or press TAB and ask myself "what is this field now?" You could arguably find the make / model through natural language processing, which with CL philosophy and resources might be a stretch.

that's a trade off. a bad one.

in CL you don't think about posting, but your ad will be removed by other sellers with higher price (happened to my nexus one when i tried to sell) and buried in a couple hours. and expire in a couple days. And then, the READER has to put in all the time the writers didn't put.

on other sites, you waste some time to write, but you can be sure you will not be removed without reason, the ad last longer, and the buyer can get there quickly.

In my experience the best way to do it is to setup a couple of searches by make & price and subscribe to those RSS feeds. I'm usually looking at maybe 8 or 10 types of cars, not all cars. In fact when I was buying my last used car I had picked out make, model, trim, year and even with that I was able to look at 4 or 5 in a few weeks from the local craigslist ads.

hm, not sure how we'd add exclusion to the search. do you find any of the price/mileage filters useful or do you really just want to be able to say "No Hyundai" (or whatever)?

I think we'd also like to add some basic recommendation engine type stuff soon - my last car was a $500 tercel so feel you on the ubercheap classification. If we had a "Sort by Cheapest Reliable" option would that be useful?

Thanks!

For starters just let people browse all used cars near them, you can even geo-located using ip.

Then provide a keyword, mileage and price filter on left--may be use range sliders?

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