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Comment by kapgoals | Hacker News Reader

23 pointskapgoals16 comments

Last time I shopped for a used car, the ones that were lowest in price, age, and milage were vehicles that had a, shall we say, "interesting" past. One had been in a wreck (as revealed by the Carfax), and another had been used by a heavy smoker and had cigarette burns in the interior.

Their filtering approach seems like a sure-fire way to filter out intact cars in favor of listings for ones like these.

The point is that there is no way of knowing these things. We're just trying to replicate what a human would be able to decide if he/she were looking at the listings. In this example, http://autoglance.com/img/blog/hidngcars/2.png , wouldn't you contact the seller of Car A before you would contact the seller of Car B? I don't think that many people's first impression would to be skepticism towards car A and hence think that they should look at Car B first.

From a search perspective I might click on car A's add first, but then I would click on B's ad before contacting A. It would only take one little thing to make the difference. Nicer car color? Built in navteq navigation with a good screen? V8 v.s. v6? Smoke free? I could easily pay 1K for those differences.

Hiding similar, but slightly more expensive cars also means that you will be showing more entry level cars. I wouldn't wish the entry level chrysler 300 on anyone it is a stupid car that shouldn't have been made, but it will show up first on this search interface because of everything they stripped out and downgraded to make it cheap. If I was searching for a car with something more I would have a better time not using this interface.

If you wanted a particular color, you could already do that with the color filter we have set up. As for things like premium model or navigation, you certainly have a point; we're currently working on a free text search which would allow you to remove any listing that doesn't contain your search string in it's description. Hopefully this would help significantly in the situation you are describing.

The problem is, even if you add more filters, used cars are still different enough from each other that your users likely want to see the hidden results--unlike airplane seats, where some results are more expensive tickets with an additional connection and therefore 99.9% of searchers will agree that result is worse.

What if there are two cars, one of which is $250 more, but which has a few (fairly minor) additional features and is 75 miles closer to the user? Figuring out which car the user wants to see is a hard problem.

That obviously doesn't mean it's not worth working on, but my guess is your current solution is sub-optimal enough you'd be better off displaying all of the results and simply ordering them based on these criteria. Or at least making it very obvious to the user there are other relevant results, since most people are used to all relevant results being displayed in one long list (that's my guess; I'm not an expert in this at all).

Also, for 9 out of your 10 closest friends, another one of those 10 friends is taller.

Good idea in theory, however it's important to note that used car prices are negotiable, so while the car may be listed at a higher price, the seller may also be willing to accept a much lower bid.

Widespread use of a tool like this would eventually put downward pressure on prices towards the sellers' reserve price; still in the short term as a buyer you could be missing out on a great deal if you ignore the "hidden" listings.

Yeah, there are so many variables that go into what a specific used car is worth that a tool like this has some usefulness but certainly can't be relied upon to always find the "best deal." For example a car with higher mileage and a higher price may be a better deal if it has had all the recommended maintenance done at a dealership and has documentation to prove it, vs. an identical car that's had no documented maintenance.

I wonder if they are able to determine in any way the "extras" on a car. A bare base model car doesn't really compare to the same car with every extra tacked on especially if that extra upgrades the engine. Paying 2K for what was originally 10K of extras might very well be worth it.

Edit2:

Searching for Manual Infiniti G35 it sadly did exactly what I thought it might do. Two '05 matches, $1k apart so it hides the more expensive one. Looking at them though the 1k gets you nav, heated seats, better stereo etc i.e. the upgrade to the premium package of that year. At 1K price difference I would rather try to negotiate for the nicer one first.

There UI does provides a simple way of showing the worse off cars so this is all moot. Really great little way to show off their tool and get some advertising. You still have to click on all of the cars.

When I was searching for my newest (used) car, I wrote a little algorithm that could strip the relevant data down to something I could parse at a glance, including looking for keywords like "4x4" and "heated seats", etc. I ended up settling for the basic model and paying for the upgrades out of pocket. One thing I've found is people grossly overestimate the value their add-ons provide. I bought the car with the features I needed and went after-market (and self-installed) for the features I wanted.

Saved $3000 on the car (paid $5500 for it off the lot), and only spent $2000 and two weekends adding in leather seats, a locking rear differential, upgraded suspension, and extra power outlets. It's the hacker manifesto, why pay for it when you can build it?

Actually this is the Hacker Manifesto: http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?issue=7&id=3&mode=...

You might be thinking of the DIY Manifesto.

If they could determine the value of each option (others do it), they could then sort by "best value". With your Infinity G35 example, if the options that you mentioned were worth $1,500, then the nicer equipped G35 would appear first.

IMHO, this tool is of course not perfect, because it takes lots of variables to truly compare the two car listings, but it saves you time for grouping all the similar listings just using three major variables (year, mileage, price) deterministically, which you won't normally be able to spot with bare eyes when the results are displayed traditionally with a bunch of pages + thousands of listings to browse through.

What about the other features that contribute to the price of a used car? From smaller ones like if the previous owner was a smoker to larger ones like whether the car was involved in an accident (even a smaller one). Usually there is a catch with the lower price. Or should I interpret the hiding feature as "for every 9 out of 10 people selling their cars, there's an idiot that doesn't know what his car is worth".

This is kind of an obvious idea (in general) that for some reason wasn't obvious until very recently. Why would you show me two cars that are nearly the same except that one is more expensive? Why shouldn't we just show the best flights (Hipmunk)? Why shouldn't we organize our Q&A site around the question and its actual answers (Stackoverflow)?

Can you please add an option to allow "unlimited" miles from the given zip code. I'd like to see the results, country wide.

Also, adding support for Canada would be great :)

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