Car selling classifieds website ideas

[HAULN-SS]

I have some time to kill. Girlfriend is out of the country, bluegrass festivals are over, giants won the fuckin world series, and I gotta find something to do. I have been working on developing some leet web development skills, and so I decided to make a site. I of course realize there are a shitton of websites out there to sell a car, but this is an academic exercise mostly, and who knows, maybe it'll get some traffic. That said, anyone have suggestions for the kinds of things you'd like to see on a site selling cars?

here's my top 3:

1) Loads fast
2) Search by sub-model (SS, STi, etc)..seems like most sites dont let you narrow that much without using keywords
3) Good way to display pictures that are a) a good size and b) not in a slideshow or some other thing that makes you navigate away from the page
4) Map search?

I know there are 4.

[CaptainHenreh]

Sub model is not nearly as important as you think. Remember, most people want to drive beige toasters, and that's what car classified websites are geared towards. I say ditch that bit. Anyone who's searching for a "Formula Firebird" is going to be searching on forums anyway.

If you really wanted to do something like that, look at the GRM classifieds, I think they do a decent job of selling "performance" cars.

[HAULN-SS]

Hrmm - the GRM site is ok, but I was thinking more along the lines of drop down menus and shit. Their stuff just seems keyword based unless I am missing something hidden in all the damn advertisements all over their site.

[JohnC]

Crawl publicly available forums and make a best-effort at parsing basic info/pics from FS ads.

I hate having to visit every little car-specific forum just to see what's for sale in that corner of the automotive world.

[CaptainHenreh]

Crawl publicly available forums and make a best-effort at parsing basic info/pics from FS ads.

I hate having to visit every little car-specific forum just to see what's for sale in that corner of the automotive world.

This would be much more better than "another autotrader".

[HAULN-SS]

Hrmm. That could be interesting. I have been getting interested in search algorithms some lately as well. A few challenges with this: Freeform text is incredibly hard to parse, crawlers require a lot of bandwidth and heavy duty hardware, crawlers need a seed list of sites to get started, and I'm not sure how inter-linked car forums are and car for sale sites are

[caa337]

Do you plan on making money by using advertising or actually charging people when they sell something like Ebay?

[HAULN-SS]

Probably none of the above..just something free and that I could tinker with

[caa337]

Oh okay. I like the drop down boxes to select certain ideas because in sites like craigslist people will add random tags in the ad to get their car to show up in other searches.

[caa337]

Oh okay. I like the drop down boxes to select certain models ideasbecause in sites like craigslist people will add random tags in the ad to get their car to show up in other searches.