6 ms·
I aggregated 28 US Government auction sites into one search
- scarsam 5mo agoUS government auctions are scattered across at least 28 platforms. GSA sells decommissioned federal fleet. DLA Disposition moves military gear. The US Marshals front seized property through bid4assets. PublicSurplus runs school district and state-agency lots. GovDeals fronts thousands of county and municipal agencies. Fannie Mae and HUD auction foreclosed homes. None of these sites index together, and most have search UX that lost a fight with 2008. So I scraped them all and put one search box in front. 180,276 active listings as of today, normalized into a shared schema in Postgres with full-text search. About 53,000 new listings come in every week. A few real things you can buy this week, all live in the data: - A 2000 Bell 430 helicopter (executive model), $250k starting, 0 bids: https://www.govdeals.com/asset/8103/23762 https://www.govdeals.com/asset/8103/23762 - A 1985 Cessna 182R aircraft in Missouri, $33k starting, 0 bids: https://www.govdeals.com/asset/36476/430 https://www.govdeals.com/asset/36476/430 - An M75 APC armored personnel carrier on Ritchie Bros, no bids yet: https://www.rbauction.com/pdp/armored-tank-m75-apc-personnel-carrier/15014367 https://www.rbauction.com/pdp/armored-tank-m75-apc-personnel... - A Rolls-Royce ship thruster, never used, $500k starting: https://www.govdeals.com/asset/247/16144 https://www.govdeals.com/asset/247/16144 - A 2.3 kg iridium-platinum ingot (police seizure on PropertyRoom), 52 bids, currently $175k: https://www.propertyroom.com/l/iridium-platinum-ingot-ir90-pt10-2321-5g/18601461 https://www.propertyroom.com/l/iridium-platinum-ingot-ir90-p... - A 1927 Seagrave fire truck, "runs, drives, and titled," $24k, 0 bids: https://www.govdeals.com/asset/285/16223 https://www.govdeals.com/asset/285/16223 - A truck-mounted forklift from a manufacturer literally named "Donkey & Burro": https://www.govplanet.com/for-sale/Forklifts/14842632 https://www.govplanet.com/for-sale/Forklifts/14842632 The work that took longest wasn't the scraping (each source has its own quirky JSON or HTML), it was the dedup. The same Fannie Mae foreclosure shows up under three different addresses across three platforms. A "2008 Ford F-150" from GSA Fleet looks structurally identical to one from PublicSurplus, but they're different vehicles with different VINs, and the only way to know is to fingerprint enough metadata to make a confident match. There's a deal score per listing (price vs category median, bid velocity, time remaining, starting-bid ratio) and SEO landing pages per state-by-category combo, mostly because long-tail government-auction queries on Google are nearly all unanswered. Stack: Next.js, Postgres, TypeScript scrapers per source, daily refresh. Happy to answer questions about scraping the federal sites (some of them really do not want to be scraped) or how the deal scoring works.
- bbstats 5mo agoFirst thing I searched was Pokemon cards and found items with bids at 50% higher than market value...either shill bidding or folks who are bidding blindly.
- reactordev 5mo agoSurprised you even got it to load.
- yodon 5mo agoServer load issues? Home page loads. Individual states don't seem to.
- scarsam 5mo agoCaught me with the state pages doing live aggregates per request. Spent yesterday pre-rendering them and tuning the ISR caches. Should feel sharper now.
- xnx 5mo agoClone of "GovAuctions" from 3 weeks ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662945
- player_piano 5mo agoThanks for tagging! I got a "traffic spike" notification from Hackernews for my site (https://govauctions.app https://govauctions.app) and wondered what was going on :-)
- rovr138 5mo agoCurious, what are you using for notifications like this?
- player_piano 5mo agoI am still on Vercel (yes I know, trying to migrate off...) and it gives you automated alerts when there are anomalous traffic spikes. Funnily enough, I have had about 10 scrapers from various places scraping the site in the last week.
- xnx 5mo ago> I have had about 10 scrapers from various places scraping the site in the last week. I hope you're adding some fictitious entries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry) to track where those scrapes might be going.
- player_piano 5mo agoThis sounds like a fun Saturday morning creative writing activity - "lot of 150,000 surplus government Cybertrucks, lightly used"
- sikozu 5mo ago
- DevX101 5mo agoYou need to cache search queries.
- scarsam 5mo agoYes, queries are wrapped in unstable_cache (using Next.js) (5min TTL); the box was state landing pages doing aggregates uncached. Pre-rendered those overnight.
- 1970-01-01 5mo agoUS Gov auctions are great when you want 400 of something broken or want to travel through 3 states for a $1000 mil-spec kitchen sink.
- 83 5mo agoOr when you've been wanting to one up your neighbor's boat by buying a drug running speedboat with bullet holes.
- cucumber3732842 5mo agoOr want to get absolutely ripped off by the non-government sellers that are somehow allowed on those platforms. The whole point of Govdeals et al is that the seller is a known-ish quantity. If I wanted to roll the dice on garbage with fresh paint I'd be on Ritchie bros. Govdeals managed services (or whatever they call it now) is just as questionable as 3rd party sellers on any given big bog store's ecommerce "platform".
- triceratops 5mo ago> Or want to get absolutely ripped off by the non-government sellers that are somehow allowed on those platforms I didn't realize the government could become Amazon.
- ufocia 5mo agoNot government, these are private auction sites that cater to the governments.
- Barbing 5mo agoOne of the top reasons auction hunters hate gun control The worst ones will try to add a few extra holes the night before the auction
- 83 5mo ago
- sjducb 5mo agoCool idea, I tapped the vehicles / heavy equipment tabs expecting to be taken to listings. Nothing happened. Maybe these should all take you to a page that lets you sign up to see listings?
- scarsam 5mo agoFixing today. Categories should render an empty state with a signup prompt rather than a blank page.
- zikduruqe 5mo agoCan I finally find a cosmoline packed Jeep in the original crate for $50? /s I wish I had jumped on those offers back when they were in the back of Boys Life, Popular Mechanics, and SOF magazines back in the day.
- Xiaoher-C 5mo ago[flagged]
- spate141 5mo agoNot responding on states links. Maybe increase the cache and add another compute to server scaling
- scarsam 5mo agoShould be working better now.
- graybeardhacker 5mo agoLooks like you got the Hacker News hug of death. "Oops Something went wrong The server is under heavy load. Please try again in a moment. "
- scarsam 5mo agoShould be quicker now!
- pwr1 5mo agoNice execution. How are you handling deduplication when the same asset shows up on multiple sites?
- kdot 5mo agoMissed the District of Columbia
- scarsam 5mo agoJust shipped DC.
- wotsdat 5mo ago[dead]
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- perdomon 5mo agoGreat idea. Seems to be experiencing the hug of death at the moment, though.
- scarsam 5mo agoTuned the ISR cache, should be quicker now!
- sikozu 5mo agoI'm loving how the deal of the day is a golf cart. https://bidprowl.com/deal-of-the-day/2026-04-30 https://bidprowl.com/deal-of-the-day/2026-04-30
- markdown 5mo agoThis looks to be a vacant residential lot for under $3k: https://bidprowl.com/listing/vacant-lot-in-santa-clarita-los-angeles-county-ca-govdeals-26654-239 https://bidprowl.com/listing/vacant-lot-in-santa-clarita-los... What am I missing?
- scarsam 5mo agoSome are real bargains, some are landlocked or carry HOA back-fees not in the listing. The good ones tend to disappear in the first hour.
- scarsam 5mo agoDeal of the Day is whatever scored highest yesterday. Sometimes glamorous, often a golf cart.
- ambicapter 5mo agoSearch just seems broken for me. I get > Error: Invalid frameId for foreground frameId: 0 on Chrome 147.0.7727.102
- scarsam 5mo agoMaybe some chrome extension causing this on your end?
- maerF0x0 5mo agoI'm curious how much of this stuff is actually civil asset forfeiture? (Not to blame the site(s) for such practices, but to think about the whole ecosystem of how a government comes to have a bicycle, switch, truck etc) https://reason.com/category/criminal-justice/civil-asset-forfeiture/ https://reason.com/category/criminal-justice/civil-asset-for...
- shrubble 5mo agoFrom what I have seen, not too much, though vehicles might have a higher rate due to impounded cars etc.
- graybeardhacker 5mo agoI have a friend who handles dispositions of equipment for a very large government contractor. You'd probably be very surprised to see some of what goes through his warehouse. He got rid of two kid's go-karts last year. Government contractors buy some weird stuff for weird reasons.
- scarsam 5mo ago[dead]
- infecto 5mo agoDidn’t a site like this just show up a few weeks back on here? What is the interest in government auction sites?
- pimlottc 5mo agoPrices are going up. People are looking for bargains.
- sparrish 5mo agoI chose 'Colorado' from the state dropdown and got a blank page. Does the site work at all?
- scarsam 5mo agoSorry about that. State pages were doing live aggregates per request and the HN spike killed them. Pre-rendered overnight; Colorado loads instantly now.
- hchak 5mo agoCommerce is so back!
- scarsam 5mo agoYou bet!
- bandrami 5mo agoI almost bought a lighthouse 25 years ago off of a GSA auction. I'm glad my bid lost because I didn't read the fine print carefully about how much the upkeep would cost.
- ocdtrekkie 5mo agoYou just have to fund it by doing a YouTube channel about running it.
- jcoby 5mo agoThat’s exactly what the project lighthouse guys did. https://youtube.com/@project.lighthouse https://youtube.com/@project.lighthouse
- samorozco 5mo agoThe site is slow as hell. I've been waiting for 3 minutes and haven't had results.
- Unbeliever69 5mo agoVibe coders don't understand concepts such as: indexing, caching, deduping, memoization, profiling, Big O, N+1 queries, lazy loading, connection pooling, pagination, re-render management, layout thrashing, virtualization, debouncing, code splitting, memory leaks, garbage collection, streaming vs. buffering, async parallelism, main thread blocking, race conditions, backpressure, request waterfalls, payload optimization, batching, round-trip costs, cache invalidation, hot path analysis, data structure selection, and countless other concepts related to performance."
- scarsam 5mo agoCaught me with the state pages doing live aggregates per request. Spent yesterday pre-rendering them and tuning the ISR caches. Should feel sharper now.
- jjordan 5mo agoAny plans for RSS feed(s)? Would love to passively track the auctions in this manner. Per state, ending soon etc. would be fantastic.
- scarsam 5mo agoEasy ship. Will get state, category, and ending-soon feeds out this week.
- yieldcrv 5mo agoBrowsing is just one part, each jurisdiction and agency within each jurisdiction has its own process to even be able to join the auction Sometimes requiring months in advance So I want an agent that does that automatically and I don’t want to do it on my computer
- scarsam 5mo ago[dead]
- AnishLaddha 5mo agomight just be on my end, but I cant seem to access the state filtered page? i.e. https://bidprowl.com/auctions/california https://bidprowl.com/auctions/california
- scarsam 5mo ago[dead]
- edm0nd 5mo agodef some price/updating lags i saw a listing that ends in 39 minutes and was at $806 i click to be taken to the listing and its $1,270.00
- scarsam 5mo agoFair. The sub-cron only refreshed lots in the next 24h. Tightened it last night: anything ending soon refreshes every 30min, and anything not seen in 48h gets re-checked. Should be much closer to source on endings now.
- vatsachak 5mo agoSite doesn't work well. Probably made with AI. Great idea though
- minorj47 5mo agoI know they aren't states but is there a way to add Puerto Rico and the Virgin islands? I know some auction sites include them.
- scarsam 5mo agoOn the list, in next week's batch with Guam. Feel free to drop some of the ones you would like to get included!
- mmmlinux 5mo agoOh sure, bring their attention to more people and make the prices go up.
- baby_souffle 5mo agoSlow, but working well. Really needs a way to refine search results to "within X miles of $someGeoPointOrZipCode". I am seeing a lot of neat stuff in California ... but i'm not going to drive 7 hours to go pick it up :)
- me_online 5mo agoAgree, or at least a filter by town, which seems to already be included in listings.
- ____tom____ 5mo agoNot by town, please. There are about 100 in the Bay Area. That's just useless. Lat long of the town center would work. I don't need precise, but not seeing something 100 meters from me because it's in the next municipal unit is aggravating.
- markdown 5mo agohttps://bidprowl.com/listing/lot-of-355-alcatel-kyocera-sonim-cat-cellular-flip-phones-ca-govdeals-24310-2385 https://bidprowl.com/listing/lot-of-355-alcatel-kyocera-soni... This is GOLD, Jerry, GOLD!
- scarsam 5mo agoOn the list. Blocker is geocoding coverage; not all sources publish lat/long and address quality varies. Backfill in progress.
- ConanRus 5mo ago[dead]
- tectonic 5mo agoReally needs sort by distance.
- scarsam 5mo ago[dead]
- qingcharles 5mo agoDoesn't support negative query modifiers?
- scarsam 5mo agoNot yet. Plain Postgres FTS today. Will add -term exclusion.
- kraptv 5mo agoWeird, the first two auction items I checked on for Oregon (sorted by highest) were already bid for and won. Is this not clearing out finished auctions?
- scarsam 5mo agoReal bug. Adapter wasn't reading "lot closed" pages and was relying on a 7-day stale window. Tightened to 5 days plus a 30-min priority refresh on anything stale > 48h. Each adapter now flips status on the source's signal directly.
- dom96 5mo agoVery cool, is there something similar for other countries, like the UK?
- scarsam 5mo agoNot that I've built. The UK has GovBuying but that's procurement, not surplus. If you know of an aggregator I'd be curious.
- guest__user 5mo agodoes anyone know if there are us gov auction sites for places overseas like military bases embassies etc ?
- scarsam 5mo ago[flagged]