Meet Craiggers: It Blows Craigslist Out of The Water | Hacker News Reader

Meet Craiggers: It Blows Craigslist Out of The Water

readwriteweb.com

17 pointsnvineberg17 comments

I remember reading the terms of use before implementing some ideas I had. I'm no attorney, but it seemed pretty clear that this kind of thing wouldn't fly.

2. ACCESS TO THE SERVICE

craigslist grants you a limited, revocable, nonexclusive license to access the Service for your own personal use. This license does not include: (a) access to the Service by Posting Agents; or (b) any collection, aggregation, copying, duplication, display or derivative use of the Service nor any use of data mining, robots, spiders, or similar data gathering and extraction tools for any purpose unless expressly permitted by craigslist. A limited exception to (b) is provided to general purpose internet search engines and non-commercial public archives that use such tools to gather information for the sole purpose of displaying hyperlinks to the Service, provided they each do so from a stable IP address or range of IP addresses using an easily identifiable agent and comply with our robots.txt file. "General purpose internet search engine" does not include a website or search engine or other service that specializes in classified listings or in any subset of classifieds listings such as jobs, housing, for sale, services, or personals, or which is in the business of providing classified ad listing services.

Craiggers is powered by the 3taps API that just launched a month ago. They postulate that postings are facts, which are public domain. http://ww1.prweb.com/prfiles/2011/03/06/39377/ADataCommonsin...

Craigslist posts aren't facts, they are works that the authors grant a copyright to Craiglists for.

Even if a craigslist post is a fact, collections of facts like recipe books are copywritable. Not to mention that the way they are harvesting these facts is in violation of the TOS like you pointed out. They'll likely a) get sued and/or b) figure out a licensing deal.

Phew.. I made the right call then. Thanks!

The Craigslist user experience is just fine, IMHO. Rather than trying to improve what's not broken, how about finding a way to get rid of the SPAM and eliminate the scams. When it first started, Craigslist was great because there was a community of trust. As it became popular, trust disappeared.

This is a great point. How do you think an application such as craiggers can re-introduce that trust? Do you think integrating facebook/twitter would help? How about a mashup of facebook marketplace and craigslist in which you could send your friends posting, see what your friends have 'liked', etc.?

Any time I've bought or sold anything on craigslist the transaction has been with a total stranger. I don't see how tying in Facebook would be anything other than a needless annoyance.

Actually I think improving the UX is a great start on reducing the effects of spam. If you can simply mouse down the the next entry its much less of a problem.

are you kidding me? The user experience on this thing is terrible.

  - No use of whitespace around text/content.
  - Broken back button on some of the pages
  - Placeholders on front page don't disappear when you click on field.
  - Terrible layout for browsing..

Sorry, but this thing is unusable.

Additonally:

    - Narrowing down by location is way too slow (US -> NY -> NYC -> Staten island)
    - Using arrow keys while looking at an individual listing goes to the next listing, and does not scroll the single item

I'd rather browse regular CL than this.

I just tried this out. Did a search for "golf clubs" in my location. Craiggers gives me 6 results. Craigslist gave me 273.

Also, I still think the craigslist ui is actually better (I've never had a problem with it). To me, categories work better as a list to drill into, not as something to discover via search box.

Craigslist is a highly useful service, and as such, spam is inevitable (has this been codified anywhere?). I hope that they get the spam under control. But in a lot of categories, craigslist is still great.

I work on the project. It would help me out greatly if you could email the details of your search to me at dfoley@3taps.com. We really should have all of the data.

Were you typing your location into the search box? That might explain the difference. We don't currently support typing your location into the text box, but maybe we should.

Thanks!

I see a name change in their not so distant future.

Last year I installed the Craigslist Preview extension for Chrome. Sorry, but no other 'browsing enhancements' could possibly make up for inline pictures.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jmcbgcbedienblgn...

The back button; please fix it by allowing us to use it!

I've used www.searchtempest.com for a while now. I like the way they give you a radius around your location for results. Makes it somehow easier.

Won't Craig just block them from scraping the site?

Yes. I remember this the first time around - it was called listpic.com (which was a far better user experience). It lasted all of a month before craig lumbered in and shut the fucker down for serving ads off his content.

Craigslist needs to innvoate, or croak. It is absolutely useless for finding an apartment in nyc. With a few flicks of effort, it could be so much better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com