How 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)?

They 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.

You don't crawl Craigslist; you tickle Google. Craigslist can't block them... But you'll still need an excellent lawyer...

I thought Google was heavily against automated searches and blocked bots on spot.

Don't the padmapper/etc housing crawlers do this?

Those are incredibly useful too, it is much easier to see those things on a map.

I think a solution using RSS feeds may get around this, if you can have RSS feeds to everything. (Not super familiar with CL feeds.)

I 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.

Seems 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

Sorry, 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/

Ah, so it's your search feature that is broken.

Just pushed a fix. Thanks for your patience.

Pushed 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?

I don't know but before criticizing, you could just give it a try. Now searching for "iPhone 4" suggests "Apple iPhone 4" and "Apple iPhone 4S".

If they fixed it in such a short time, it was probably a bug and they really pushed a fix...

No, we just work quickly :).

You should stop being so rude. It's hard to build something like this, especially when the input data is so noisy.

Rude? I thought I was doing them a favor. Initially I thought their system did not differentiate between specific models: that would majorly impact usefulness.

Then when he explained I realized it was just a broken search feature: a much easier thing to fix.

I hope most people here don't confuse matter of fact literalism with rudeness. This is HN after all and I'm offering free user feedback to a business, something most businesses greatly appreciate.

Your sorting by price is broken: It's sorting strings, not numbers, and counts "$900" as being higher than "$2000".

I 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).

Makes 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.

I 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.

We've been investigating arbitraging Aeron chairs. We're finding they're very hard to lug around. We'll keep you posted!

Haha. I thought you were being facetious until I saw it on your about page. Now I'm not sure what to think :/

But wouldn't that be worse for the users?

Note 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/ by nostromo looks better (but they just focuse on amazon price monitoring);

I 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.

wouldn't microsoft (bing), google, walmart, etc? I think this is why startups exist...

I 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.

Hey 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

Nonetheless, thanks for the feedback!

At 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...

Congrats on the launch guys. We do something similar but for different online markets -- most commonly Amazon -- (e.g.: 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.

Cool! 'Macbook Air' did not return a result though :(

Thanks 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

We'll get it cleaned up for you in the next version!

Fixed! http://priceonomics.com/search?s=macbook+air

Cool - thanks a lot!

Price for EVERYTHING? But no commodities, oil, coffee, etc.

I 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.

So it's yet another price comparison site. What's so special about it?

Do 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.