Looked for Toyota Tundra, found none. Typed it in again, and chose a few of the auto-completes suggested to me. No results. Looked for a F-150, no results. It's one thing to not have some of the most popular automobiles available, but quite another to not have results for something that you suggested I search for. Besides that, what is this supposed to do? If I click on one of the cars that it happens to have I get a blank page. Is this supposed to help me buy a car? See what's out there? Know fair value? I just think that someone jumped the gun on this, and it could be executed on quite a bit better
Basically, Google is trying to go after KBB, Edmunds, and to a lesser extent TrueCar/Carwoo, and hit right at the "what is a fair market price".
Given that they are saying that they are gathering the data, it probably explains why they coverage is not that good for inventory, but I'd expect that to be remedied quickly if they put sufficient resources behind it.
It should be noted that this appears to be a new car thing primarily.
Interesting. Must be in soft-launch - I get "Zip code not in the supported region." This won't be a direct Craigslist competitor as it seems to be aimed at dealer inventories.
Yep, they made this mistake with flight search also. Let everyone know about a service with crappy data, then everyone thinks it is crappy and never go back to it. Brilliant, from the minds of geniuses. It worked for Gmail because users didn't need data to begin with, but it doesn't work for services that require a lot of data to start with to be viable. And even if you have data, it better be good; ask Apple about their maps.
I disagree completely. I've bought and sold numerous cars on Craigslist and always got exactly what I expected. I take the car for a drive, take it to a mechanic I know well, then get the mechanic to run down the list of "issues" with buyer and seller present. The mechanic usually says something like "I wouldn't pay more than $x based on the issues".
99% of the time that's the price we agree on, and that's that.
I personally have sold 2 used cars on Craigslist, each for $5-6,000 cash (blue book values). From my standpoint, it was fabulous. I paid no seller's fees, was able to schedule the test drives at my convenience, and sold both cars within days. If anything, the demand was shockingly good.
And, I sold good cars. So I knew no one was being scammed.
I couldn't disagree more, Craigslist is where all the best deals are, most sites like Auto Trader (and my own http://www.AUsedCar.com) are mostly dealers. So yes, there are less scams, but you also get less deals...
Interesting how your anecdotal evidence is so uncommon. Maybe you live in an area where scammers use Craigslist more than other buy/sell methods to perpetuate their scams?
Well actually it is. This, not having to do with cars or anything like this, is because Germany want's to establish some kind of "tax" on sites like Google News, to subside it's big publishing-houses.
Google is aggressively lobbying for a "free" internet (free meaning, Google can make money as they see fit) and the publishers are lobbying aggressively for this law, to get some slice of the advertising-cake, that ends up in Googles purse. As the publishers are not able to build a successful online-business, they try to lobby for this subsidiary.
So some kind of "lobby-war" between Google, German publishers and the German Government going on right now.
Looks a little half-baked – only 3 BMW M3s near Silicon Valley, and no Porsches? Otherwise, the interface looks nice, and I hope they crawl more inventory, including pre-owned.
It reminds me of the ill-fated Google Real Estate search (http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2011/01/retiring-real-est...). That said, Google was going up against strong competitors in Trulia and Zillow at the time, and there doesn't seem to be a strong competitor in the car search space.
A big problem is that the photos shown are stock photos (atleast the ones I looked at were marked as stock photos). So in a few cases, the prices don't match the photo. For instance, I looked for Honda Fit and the stock photo shows a Honda Fit Sport model which is priced a couple of K higher than the price they have against the photo.
Does anyone know what data feed they're pulling from? Or if they're pulling from one? I couldn't find a Honda Civic within 100 miles of me. My local classifieds showed 449 results for the same search -- looks like my zip isn't supported.
Suffice it to say they're going to need a better feed to search if this will ever be successful.
I was part of the team that did this: http://www.newcars.com/carchooser#1
While it requires flash, it's a lot more flexible and includes the ability to compare across makes and models.
A lot of the new products, Google tries (and aggregating sale info on cars is just one of them) is actually not ready. It is not in a state, that is really usable, or has a good UX.
But non the less, other aggregation-sites are being punished by the differend Panda-Updates, for reasons, of too less content, bad UX, et al.
So practically Google punishes sites, throws them out of the index (or a lot further back) and then builts something, they did perfectly fine - just to make money on this.
If I would have to imagine, where the data came from... well why would Google have forced the microformats and machine-readable content... OK, forget that. Sounds just too much like a conspiracy... ;-)
Looked for Toyota Tundra, found none. Typed it in again, and chose a few of the auto-completes suggested to me. No results. Looked for a F-150, no results. It's one thing to not have some of the most popular automobiles available, but quite another to not have results for something that you suggested I search for. Besides that, what is this supposed to do? If I click on one of the cars that it happens to have I get a blank page. Is this supposed to help me buy a car? See what's out there? Know fair value? I just think that someone jumped the gun on this, and it could be executed on quite a bit better