Ask HN: Please review a Craigslist mashup [alpha] | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Please review a Craigslist mashup [alpha]

flippity.com

28 pointsslay2k29 comments

I have heard that they (Craigslist) do not encourage third party sites doing mashups (or enhancing the default search facility).

See http://www.codinghorror.com/craigslist/

They may block your site if they find out you violate their policies.

Yup, they're not very friendly to 3rd parties.

But Jeff pissed them off by going against a core value -- staying local. On the flip side, sites like housingmaps.com & craiglook.com have been up for many years.

The CL terms of service are very clear. However sometimes they make exceptions if you ask for permission and your site is not for profit. http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use

...you agree not to:...

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;

Appreciate the quote, but I know all this. This is why a) we don't pull from craigslist and b) i've talked to craig about it.

I chose to talk to him even though we could get the data without them knowing.

How do you get the data?

Which is unfortunate, because a tool like this would save millions of people hours spent browsing through individual listings on Craigslist. It's just so much better.

It seems odd that Craigslist doesn't readily open itself up to developers. What they've achieved so far is incredible. In this talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAk1MX3ES_g) Fred Wilson estimates that Craigslist is doing around $100 million in revenue with fantastic margins. He guess that classifieds in newspapers were bringing in a lot more revenue but with much worse margins meaning that, although the classifieds industry has collapsed into Craigslist, the amount of profit being made might not have changed too much.

How can Craigslist grow?

They have all the data and destination site that has insane traffic. In order to really be everywhere they're going to have to open up to developers to allow their content to spread all over the web. It's what Google has been doing for years and it's what Facebook is trying to do now.

I really hope Craigslist start championing efforts like Flippity. Awesome work guys!

This is what oodle is gunning for.

I think that you should do an automatic initial search for new users, perhaps using their IP as a location hint.

This is a really cute way of browsing the Craiglist data.

Interesting. Already doing geo-IP lookup when you enter a blank `where` field.

That doesn't tell users that the `where` field is optional. It would be better to fill in a default value from the geo-IP lookup.

Thanks for all the feedback thus far.

All the bugs & suggestions have been noted, and I have several features in the pipeline such as being notified by email when a new posting matches your search.

My main question is this: do you see this as something that adds value, such that I should continue working on it ?

yes please. if this was continuously improved it would become my main interface for craigslist.

try user accounts so i don't have to type in my zip code every search. and so i can save certain searches.

and a really killer feature would be if i searched for 'desktop computer' the category searched was automatically set to 'computers/tech'

thanks!

Needs a "this site requires javascript" message. Its mostly a blank page for noscript users.

Needs a map key telling me what the colors mean. I think they mean how many items in that location, but I think a better use of color would be how "fresh" the item is.

Agreed.

PS: Scour eh ? Met your cofounder Kevin while I was @ google. UCLA LUG 4 life ;)

That would be the new scour.com, not the old p2p search engine.

Its not mine anymore either way- sold it to advertise.com

Pictures. We shop craigslist via listings with pictures. We want the pictures up front and easy to find. The map roll over would be good, or as a thumbnail on the listings. Other then that, it looks great and is a site I would use.

Understood, and I'd have them already if craig decided to not exclude them from RSS feeds. Presumably to shut down previous, more annoying offenders. Wanna talk to him ? :)

It wasn't obvious to me what this sight is for until I hit the search button.

Very nice interface!

Just curious, how do you get the locations of the ads? Is it limited in resolution to the locale it's posted in? (I don't see any addresses listed in a lot of them.)

If there's a geocodable address in the optional location field, we use that. If not, it will default to the general region it's posted in.

We're currently seeing approx 75% of listings geocoding correctly, but like you said the resolution is often low. In order to change that, we'd need at minimum cross-street level data from Craig. And although I've talked to him about it, I don't think I have enough leverage to change this without a user outcry..

Well done. I've been craving this kind of tool forever. All the previous implementations I've seen failed by having stale data. If you can solve that, this will be a hit.

Thanks. What is it specifically that you've been craving ?

Doesn't seem to work for Canadian listings. A shame. I like it a lot though.

Tell you what, get a bunch of your friends to email me requests for a Canadian province, and I'll start pulling it into our db :)

romy@ucla d0t edu

loads super fast, which is a plus. nice design. i like the radius option too.

I would really like pictures in more of the results, the most logical location would be on the map from the onMouseOver in the result list.

Also, for some reason it took me a few minutes to figure out the what went in the first field and where in the second instead of the other way around. Don't know what you can do about my incompetence there though.

It would also be nice to keep the 'search for location' box around when you get to the results. Because of my mistake I ended up in Germany and had to click back and enter my query again.

Wow this is awesome. Very intuitive and it looks great.

This is incredibly minor, but a favicon would make it look nicer.

Thanks and done.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com