6 ms·
Show HN: New way to search for used cars (my weekend project)
Each dot on the chart is a car.
Horizontal scale = mileage.
Vertical scale = price.
The size of a dot = year (newer = larger), plus I colored 2007 .. 2011 in different colors to find "fresh" cars quicker.
This is just some sample data from the last 24 hours, relatively cheap cars under $32,000 within 500 mile radius of NYC.
- mapster 15y agoIs the idea to separate the wheat from the chaff? For a good deal, my eye tends to look away from the cluster and find outliers, but these $399 or leases not the asking price.
- Triumvark 15y agoThis same thing comes up in eBay, Craigslist... Some court should declare that a headline is a real offer, and if someone calls to accept, then it's a binding contract.
- oleg_kikin 15y agoEach dot on the chart is a car. Horizontal scale = mileage. Vertical scale = price. The size of a dot = year (newer = larger), plus I colored 2007 .. 2011 in different colors to find "fresh" cars quicker. This is just some sample data from the last 24 hours, relatively cheap cars under $32,000 within 500 mile radius of NYC.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jackpirate 15y agoI like the visualization. This could be a great way to visualize if you're getting a good deal or getting ripped off. Four things: 1. I don't see a way to change my location. Without that, the tool is essentially useless to anyone but you. 2. It's not obvious what the colors or sizes of the dots represent. 3. Have you considered superimposing Kelly Blue Book info? That could add some interesting trend lines. 4. A blog post analyzing how well different brands retain their value could be a great way to drive traffic. I imagine their might actually be some money in adwords around used cars.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- oleg_kikin 15y agoEach dot on the chart is a car. Horizontal scale = mileage. Vertical scale = price. The size of a dot = year (newer = larger), plus I colored 2007 .. 2011 in different colors to find "fresh" cars quicker. This is just some sample data from the last 24 hours, relatively cheap cars under $32,000 within 500 mile radius of NYC.
- b2spirit 15y agoWhere did you find the used car data?
- oleg_kikin 15y agoDownloaded 20 search results pages from cars.com. I wish I had direct access to their DB. Craigslist has a ton of car postings, but it's not structured in any way, will be very hard to parse.
- johnbatch 15y agoHave you looked at the Vast API. http://www.vast.com/info/customapi http://www.vast.com/info/customapi
- oleg_kikin 15y agoI will take a look at it, thanks!
- Triumvark 15y agoI wonder if Carmax has an API...
- msluyter 15y agoHeh. My company provides cars.com with most of its data, so I have direct access to their db. ;) However, because our business model is predicated on aggregating and then reselling automotive data, it's unlikely you could get access for free. Still, if you think you'll ever want to go commercial, you might contact us: (DMI) Digital Motorworks Inc.
- keyle 15y agoPretty cool, would be nice to be able to click right on the spot to the open a new tab with the cars.com page. Would also be useful to change location. Also to drill down by model / year. etc. But for a week-end project, congrats.
- irfn 15y agoIndeed. search features/ drill down would be useful
- gsivil 15y agoNice idea! The picture is already almost unusable while you have something like 3300 cars featured. Do you have any thought on how to deal with that problem?
- oleg_kikin 15y agoYeah, it's pretty busy with all of them together, but I assume that usually people want a specific brand (and often a specific model of that brand). I will add more filters soon - by year, location, model.
- prawn 15y agoLocation and any other filters (particular makes/models or years or price ranges) would help with that. A front door of a site like this could have a screen cap, filter and then some quick-to-click pre-filters (Toyota SUVs made after 2005, or station wagons under $8k, etc).
- irfn 15y agodoesnt work in safari
- gsivil 15y agoIt worked fine in Safari Version 5.1 (7534.48.3)
- oleg_kikin 15y agoI don't have access to OSX, it works on my Safari under Win7.
- coreyja 15y agoThis is what I got when I tried in Safari 5.05 under Snow Leopard. Not sure if it helps since you can't test but here ya go. Also shows the errors I got in the error log console. http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/3154/screenshot20110815at134.png http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/3154/screenshot20110815at134....
- oleg_kikin 15y agoI think it didn't like the gzipped JS file with the data. Not sure why, pretty much all modern browsers should support it.
- AntiRush 15y agoTry naming the gzip file something else, like .js.jgz. Safari automatically opens many archive types, including, I believe, gzip.
- dw0rm 15y agoFrom safari error console: car_data.js.gz:1 SyntaxError: Parse error ReferenceError: Can't find variable: car_data
- fuzzythinker 15y agoVery nice! To make it even better, draw an imaginary arc from upper left corner to lower right corner and filter out all the "noise" ("Worst" data) from the graph, then stretch the data within the arc to fill the filtered empty space. That way, the dots won't be cluttered and thus more user friendly. You can put a foot note about the avg & "worst" data point filtered.
- bluehat 15y agoPretty serious bug, I can't click any of the links because once I mouse off the circle the link is gone and I'm focused on a different car. (Firefox and Chrome on Linux)
- oleg_kikin 15y agoYeah, it looks like I will have to make the circles clickable.
- timc3 15y agoReally good stuff, would love to see this used on other sites as well such as one that is local to Sweden.
- joelhaasnoot 15y agoOne thing is that for some reason I'm expecting the good deals to be in the top right hand corner, most bang-for-the-buck charts work that way, while your graph shows it in the top left corner, it's slightly confusing that way.
- oleg_kikin 15y agoThat's actually a very good point, thanks. It looks like I will have to reverse both axes.
- coreyja 15y agoActually the 'most bang-for-the-buck' on his graph is the lower left corner not the upper left. I agree that it is kinda strange at first but once I realized it, it wasn't that bad.
- joelhaasnoot 15y agoAh, see, confused me even more. Might have something to do with the green coloring, green = better, yet it's related to the car's year.
- jmatt 15y agoThere's a 2005 Bentley Continental GT for $29,800. Seems like a good buy. I think someone forgot a zero? http://www.cars.com/go/search/detail.jsp?tracktype=usedcc&csDlId=&csDgId=&listingId=72195272&listingRecNum=4763&criteria=sf1Dir%3DASC%26ldNmb%3D1%26rd%3D500%26crSrtFlds%3DfeedSegId-ldId%26zc%3D10001%26rn%3D4750%26PMmt%3D0-0-0%26sf2Dir%3DASC%26sf1Nm%3Dprice%26sf2Nm%3Dmiles%26isDealerGrouping%3Dfalse%26ldId%3D28882%26rpp%3D250%26feedSegId%3D28705&aff=national http://www.cars.com/go/search/detail.jsp?tracktype=usedcc... Your app made it easy enough to find an exception like this.
- joelhaasnoot 15y agoThere's also several cars for $299, but in the description are $2990 down...
- coreyja 15y agoThats cause thats how they are classified on cars.com. Can't blame the developer. He scrapped the data correctly just some smart ass marketing guy who put up the ads cheated...
- true_religion 15y agoDealing with bad data sources is like product development 101. You're not supposed to "blame" the developer, but pointing it out and expecting a fix is fair. It's a weekend project, but even weekend projects evolve with free time.
- pulak 15y agoIt's a deceptive listing, but in the description on cars.com you can see that these are $299 per month for 72 months
- henry501 15y agoMaybe a price filter? Let us manually set the minimum to $1k.
- reemrevnivek 15y ago
- phreeza 15y agoInterestingly, it looks a lot like a Pareto optimal curve that is being optimized for maximum value to the seller, not the buyer.
- archangel_one 15y agoWhich would make sense since the seller sets the asking price. We don't know how much each car is actually going to sell for - presumably the buyers have more influence on that curve.
- brado86 15y agoQuick Suggestion: Could you add an option to slice by car model? People would be more interested in looking for cars by brand+model than just brand.
- oleg_kikin 15y agoYes, I will add that.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- dprice1 15y agoKeeping a historical trove of prices would also be really neat-- then you could see what to expect. It's cool, I would use it. I'd love to be able to set a range of mileage and price, filter by model names, location, etc. etc.
- icodestuff 15y agoDoesn't work in OmniWeb 5.10.3
- stevederico 15y agoLooks Great. Reminds me of a hipmunk for cars.
- revorad 15y agoThis is fantastic. I'm working on something similar for other product categories. One rule of thumb I'm going by is to show as few results to the user as possible. Shopping sites often offer so much choice that the user is too paralysed to make a decision. I'd change the default setting from showing all brands to 2-3 at most. Simple sliders to narrow down the price and mileage range would improve the usability a lot. Plus, if you're presenting any information as shape, colour or size, you need to show a key which explains what it means. You've done remarkably well to put this up in a weekend. I need to pull my socks up and release my v1 asap. Good luck!
- yangyang 15y agoIt would also be nice to have the option of using age instead of mileage, or possibly miles / year. Sometimes an old car that's hardly ever driven, with a low mileage, isn't as good a bet as a newer car with lots of miles that's been well maintained.
- msellout 15y agoThat's true, but age is so strongly correlated with mileage that it's an insignificant factor in sell-price once you control for mileage (Based on my own research using proprietary data).
- robinduckett 15y agoI have to be honest here, whilst technically this is very good, from a customer's perspective and from a "person what works in the industry" perspective, I feel this isn't the best. It's certainly new, but that doesn't mean the user experience is any good. I agree that the standard "pick a make and model and hope for the best" kind of search is in dire need of an update, but I don't have the UX design experience or even the creativity to invent a new way of doing it, but what I do know, is what currently works, and what doesn't. Instant feedback on the search as you are performing it is cool, and I've recently worked on a system that feeds back to the user the amount of cars that are going to be returned by their selected criteria as they select them, and it works pretty well and looks great, degrades nicely and allows someone to make a quick judgement about how broad or narrow their search is on the fly. I'd like to see a new way to search for used cars that merges this level of visual detail with the standard selection criteria based way of searching, and hopefully something great can grow out of that, but until then, mixing up the interface like this will just confuse people. Apart from my qualms, I do think this is pretty excellent and daring, but not really practical at the current time.
- stef25 15y agoVery cool! How are you generating the graph, if you don't mind me asking? I'm using Google Charts for something similar. EDIT: ok seems to be http://raphaeljs.com/ http://raphaeljs.com/
- pyrhho 15y agoDesperately needs some sort of legend (at leas for the colors). I thought Fords were Purple, but then found some yellow, and some pink fords, and was thoroughly confused as to what the color was representing.
- dkokelley 15y agoYear, I believe.
- rokhayakebe 15y agoYou have an algorithm that can classify cars from best to worse depending on a lot of input. That is the money, not the visualization (although very cool). The best to display ranking is a numbered list. Although not super cool, that is very valuable.
- reemrevnivek 15y agoThere are cheap cars with low mileage, expensive cars with low mileage, expensive cars with high mileage, and cheap cars with high mileage, and everything in between. Unless the cheapest car also has the lowest mileage, and the most expensive car also has the highest mileage, there is no "best" or "worst" in this classification. There is only a tradeoff between inputs, the two primary ones shown here are mileage and price, with age overlaid by color/dot size. 2D data requires visualization and human interpretation - There is no algorithm in place here. A list only works on 1 dimensional data (and can be parsed trivially with a simple sort algorithm). 3D and higher dimension data requires more complex visualization and more effort to parse. A visualization allowing the user to make good decisions based on several inputs is a great place to find 'the money'.
- ComputerGuru 15y agoAmazing work. I can only say I wish I had this a month ago when I was searching for a used car. (ended up with a 2005 A4 Special Edition w/ 95k miles for 9k USD) EDIT: Would be great if we can add another dimension or at least switch one of the axises to a different dataset - in particular, the year. EDIT2: I now realize the colors are the year. This addresses my previous concern, but you need a legend for that. EDIT3: Scratch that - Colors are not year. I don't know what's going on.. but colors as years would have been nice.
- reemrevnivek 15y agoThe OP said higher up that: > The size of a dot = year (newer = larger), plus I colored 2007 .. 2011 in different colors to find "fresh" cars quicker.
- h6165 15y agoHow do I click the "Link" for a car in the middle of the dot-cloud?
- martin1b 15y agoVery nice! Really easy to visualize the data and find what you're looking for without combing through hundreds of search results. Couple of thoughts: The colors are a bit confusing. I understand the year, but a legend might help. Would be cool to add search terms to limit models. Would be nice to easily change location. Other than that, really excellent idea and nice implementation!
- kennethologist 15y agoI like the visualization. Reminds me of Hans Rosling. Keep up the good work. MAybe this kind of visualization can be applied to other areas.
- arepb 15y agoYou should check out VAST or Oodle as data sources with an API to plot your graph. I really dig that you did here. I would only add that "Better" isn't always the cheapest option.
- dkokelley 15y agoWhat a great start! I think this has the potential to be a powerful tool for future car buyers. It will need some work first. The user interaction will be confusing to many. Legends, instructions, and a general UI cleanup will help lots. Another thing to consider is adding more search parameters (year, model, price range, body style, location, source, etc.). I'm sure you've already got all of this in the development pipeline. If you gave this a little polish and its own memorable domain name, I would almost certainly use this tool to research my next car. Also, car buyers are a significant demographic to car manufacturers. I could see this being a valuable resources for buyers and sellers (of new cars) alike.