Comment by joshwa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshwa | Hacker News Reader

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It always drove me nuts that craigslist's searches didn't have more structure/parameters to them. Big points for not accepting brokers, too.

A few small interaction notes/feature requests:

  * why can't I search by square footage?

  * need to add lots more parametrized amenities (garden, dogs ok/cats ok, balcony,
    central a/c, furnished, etc)

  * need to search on brooklyn neighborhoods! park slope != bed-stuy.

  * when I click on a map pin, i'd expect to either get a modal dialog with more
    info, or to be taken directly to the listing page. Just showing me a single
    search result is a little unexpected and not especially useful.

  * If I click Browse to go back to search, my last search parameters/results 
    should be retained

  * the chat widget on the community page isn't loading for me (FF 3.5/OSX)

  * The "Oct Deals" link is really cool, but doesn't really tell me what I'm 
    about to see. Also, at the top of the linked-to page, it says September. 

  * Why a different UI for the amenities search-- add button vs. checkboxes?

PS need a product manager?

PPS: I really need to submit a patch to the HN code to do list formatting

You know, to actually have a feature like search by square footage or some other quantity usable, you would not only have to have that field but train every user to enter that field in the form. And that's not going to happen.

The user will paste in whatever they're written already for the description and put random stuff in the extra fields. Especially when it's a Realtor/broker/etc - they want a listing to include the good stuff but not have to say anything about the bad stuff (including that it's doesn't have XYZ). The Realtor speak that seems to pollute newspapers and craigslist only seems like a disaster to us. In reality, it is a finely tuned system combining communication and non-communication that has arisen over the years.

Craigslist is the victory of "good enough to understand", which is exactly how human natural language works. The continuous Craigslist complaints here are about "it should be up to my ideal" are about not getting that "good enough" is the way that people prefer to communicate - with added ambiguity often being prized by at least one of the communicators - notice how job search ads generally work the same work (the number of Palo Alto locations I've gotten when I've searched for San Francisco on Dice.com isn't any more coincidental than craigslist's disfunction and Dice.com is only paid ads).

Oh I agree, especially in the context of craigslist. However in RentHop's situation I view it a little differently--you're not getting 50,000 crazy brokers fresh from their license exams inputting stuff, instead it comes from the RE management companies who can be expected to do a slightly better job of things.

Also, I only asked about it once I saw that 4/5 listings I looked at on RentHop actually had that field filled in!

Great feedback. Square footage data is a bit too unpopulated for us to feel comfortable allowing that search (same with breaking up Brooklyn, sadly).

Your other points are very valid. The map behavior in the "search map" mode seems to be more popular, so we'll keep that in mind as we revamp browse listings mode.

I think craigslist just needs a decent API. That way you'll get all the listings in one central location, and still get decent search possibilities.

Any idea why Craigslist is so vehemently opposed to either providing an API, or allowing others to scrape their site for data?

It doesn't seem to align with many of their other principles of openness.

It goes against what their intentions are. As Jeff Atwell found out http://www.codinghorror.com/craigslist/

If they released an API that allowed searches in multiple cities than it becomes less craigslist and more ebay. Where buyers are looking for deals all over the place instead of the deals in their town.

It appears that they've disabled RSS feeds for custom searches (pretty much any search that sets url query keywords), but they used to accidentally have a pretty sweet REST api.

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