Show HN: AutoAPI Vehicle Web Crawler – Searches the Web to Find the Best Deals | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: AutoAPI Vehicle Web Crawler – Searches the Web to Find the Best Deals

autoapi.com

11 pointsAutoAPI15 comments

Reminds me of Carsabi (YCW12). If I remember, they built a good product and found a vein, but ultimately struggled with a business model.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/01/facebook-acqhires-founders-...

It seems working now. (Mon July 13, 10:43 Pacific).

One thing I noticed is that the range is capped to 100 miles. An unlimited range would be incredibly useful for searching for used exotics, i.e. Ferraris, which is a valid input parameter :-). Since supply (both overall and for a particular configuration) is so limited, it makes sense to buyers to fly to see the car or to buy blind and ship the car to them.

This will be added very soon. In the meantime, if you change "distance=100" in the url to "distance=all" you can search all results -- although in some cases we dont allow this (like if you havent select a make) as it is pretty intensive on the server when we have a lot of results to return.

We have done similar search engine for Turkish used car ad sites. It has been really fun to build such a thing since there are number of things to compensate and normalize data collected from various sources. I have learned a lot while doing it.

http://www.otomobul.com

What sources are you searching? I searched all for particular car and got no results. I know there are over 500 on Craigslist alone.

Craigslist does not allow websites to scrape their content

I just checked Autotrader too. 46 listed there. Car search is tricky. It's something I've been thinking about for a while now.

[Edit] I'd love to see someone do car search right!

What are you scraping? These all seem to be from dealers, marked up a ton.

Can't select the model when trying to do a search.

Do you have Javascript enabled? When you choose a make the models are fetched on the fly using AJAX

down for updates, check back soon! :(

Under high loads the site restricts access to non USA/Canada IP ranges

out of curiosity. what do you guys use for API management?

Custom platform using Laravel, but definitely interested in Mashape. Have an email to discuss?

aghi@mashape.com

Also tak a look at the open source API gateway http://getkong.org and https://apianalytics.com for Visualization and Monitoring of API traffic.

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