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Priceonomics (YC W12) Tells You What Everything is Worth
- revorad 15y agoDo you guys actually have any products available or is this just an email harvesting launch? I ask because I tried a lot of items and they were all sold out. :-) I'm impressed by your courage to launch with a half-baked product like this. I wish I could do the same.
- adelevie 15y agoI remember when SeatGeek presented at TechCrunch Disrupt(?) in 2009, pg took issue at the fact that they didn't use their ticket price data to arbitrage the secondary ticket market. Does Pricenomics use its data to arbitrage any markets, and if not, why should the same criticism not apply? All that aside, Pricenomics looks compelling. Hopefully it will substantially increase the efficiency of second hand "stuff" markets.
- rohin 15y agoWe've been investigating arbitraging Aeron chairs. We're finding they're very hard to lug around. We'll keep you posted!
- adelevie 15y agoHaha. I thought you were being facetious until I saw it on your about page. Now I'm not sure what to think :/
- revorad 15y agoBut wouldn't that be worse for the users?
- themenace 15y agoI think it's a great idea and wish these guys success. But isn't eBay (and perhaps Craigslist) in a much better position to provide this functionality? They have enormous historical databases on the prices of things.
- veemjeem 15y agowouldn't microsoft (bing), google, walmart, etc? I think this is why startups exist...
- jerryji 15y agoTalking about historical database on prices, how about a real-time platform that records (and social broadcasts) all real things that have been bought and sold? -- http://bizspeaking.com http://bizspeaking.com
- nostromo 15y agoCongrats on the launch guys. We do something similar but for different online markets -- most commonly Amazon -- (e.g.: http://www.shopobot.com/tv/ http://www.shopobot.com/tv/). One of our most common user requests is to provide this info for CraigsList and Ebay, so I'm sure you'll find success there.
- jrubinovitz 15y agoI went hunting for "macbook pro i7" and every item I clicked on (something like 4 or 5) had already been sold. It does look like something I would use otherwise(EDIT: as in if I had a better success rate when I clicked).
- omarish 15y agoMakes sense. We'll have fresher data up there in the very near term. Also, it's not super obvious, but you can use the left and right arrows in that lightbox to navigate the listings.
- ilamont 15y agoHow do startups get around the Craigslist TOU against using "automated means, including spiders, robots, crawlers, data mining tools, or the like to download data from the Service" (http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use)?
- paulhauggis 15y agoI wondered the same. A guy was actually sued over this for his automated crawling/posting bots he was selling as a service. From what I've heard, their lawyers are pretty relentless. I think he is also a reader on HN.
- jpdoctor 15y agoDon't the padmapper/etc housing crawlers do this? Those are incredibly useful too, it is much easier to see those things on a map.
- CoffeeDregs 15y agoYou don't crawl Craigslist; you tickle Google. Craigslist can't block them... But you'll still need an excellent lawyer...
- slig 15y agoI thought Google was heavily against automated searches and blocked bots on spot.
- gms 15y agoThey don't - it's a bit "don't ask, don't tell". The hope is that if Craigslist ever decides to enforce the TOU, said startup is popular enough that they can work out a deal.
- binarysolo 15y agoI think a solution using RSS feeds may get around this, if you can have RSS feeds to everything. (Not super familiar with CL feeds.)
- richardburton 15y agoCool! 'Macbook Air' did not return a result though :(
- midas 15y agoThanks for the feedback and sorry about that. We made some tweaks to our search this morning to speed it up for launch and some searches like yours suffered as a result. This (unintuitive) search should get you what you're looking for: http://priceonomics.com/search?s=apple+macbook+air http://priceonomics.com/search?s=apple+macbook+air We'll get it cleaned up for you in the next version!
- omarish 15y agoFixed! http://priceonomics.com/search?s=macbook+air http://priceonomics.com/search?s=macbook+air
- richardburton 15y agoCool - thanks a lot!
- colinm 15y agoPrice for EVERYTHING? But no commodities, oil, coffee, etc.
- zeratul 15y agoNote to self: data mining web app; few visual bugs; duplicates; I can see only "Bad News! This Item Already Sold."; no info where an ad comes from; they use jquery; actually http://www.shopobot.com/ http://www.shopobot.com/ by nostromo looks better (but they just focuse on amazon price monitoring);
- forensic 15y agoSeems like premature publicity. Great idea that is far from being useful right now. If you actually want customers you need to prove you can provide value. My first try was "iPhone 4" and it showed me the average price for all iPhones, from iPhone originals to broken iPhones to locked iPhones etc. That's useless. unless you can identify the specific product and give me a number, this is not useful and I'm better off googling it
- omarish 15y agoSorry, that isn't quite as clear as it could be. Here's a link to the page you're looking for: http://priceonomics.com/phones/apple/ http://priceonomics.com/phones/apple/
- forensic 15y agoAh, so it's your search feature that is broken.
- omarish 15y agoJust pushed a fix. Thanks for your patience.
- jackpirate 15y agoPushed a fix? He had a major critique of the way search works, not a minor bug report. What could you really have changed in such a short time?
- ryanglasgow 15y agoI searched 'iPod' and there were no results. Why would they launch a half-baked website 3 days before Christmas? They should have admitted they missed the holidays and polished things up before launching.
- omarish 15y agoHey Ryan - that's my fault. I pushed some last minute fixes to handle the TC traffic. Apple iPod works but iPod doesn't. We'll have to graduate to a proper search tool at some point: http://priceonomics.com/search?s=apple+ipod http://priceonomics.com/search?s=apple+ipod Nonetheless, thanks for the feedback!
- cperciva 15y agoYour sorting by price is broken: It's sorting strings, not numbers, and counts "$900" as being higher than "$2000".
- rokhayakebe 15y agoI used to be "kind-of-a" used car dealer, and I always thought I could build this same product to help get a better idea of how much to bid on cars at the auction. Basically it would get current listings on CL in my city for model ZYX from YY to YY. Knowing how many similar rides are on the market and the average asking price is great insight.
- rorrr 15y agoSo it's yet another price comparison site. What's so special about it?
- Tichy 15y agoAt first glance I didn't see anything that searching ebay with "show only expired auctions" wouldn't also give me. But it is probably still early days...