I've seen a few similar sites in the past but all of the sites I have come across just use Google custom search. My website allows you to search all of Craigslist (Backpage coming soon). You can search and browse nationwide, statewide and city wide. This gives you a lot more freedom when browsing for items you may be willing to travel for. I put a lot of time into the system although it looks pretty simple. It runs on LEMP. I use php, java, python and c++ to develop the system. It uses MySQL as a database and ElasticSearch for search queries. Let me know what you think so far. I still have another day of work before I release it fully, I'm finishing up the search/browse menu for when multiple States/cities are selected. http://www.adhoarder.com
I have to say the searching is very slow... I search "RegNow Custom Email", and two minutes passed it is still searching... BTW, I am not sure how many people will use the "I am feeling lucky" button, but I never used it
Thanks for the review. I came to the office this afternoon to find we had network wide issues that needed to be resolved. Our elasticsearch system was down all morning so I'm guessing the search results never loaded. If you get a chance, check it out now that elasticsearch is back up. I'm still trying to optimize the search, currently averaging a second and a half searching over 10,000,000 ads. I feel the same way about the I'm feeling lucky button, I never use it either. I was just trying to add a little to an already very simple looking system.
I've just tried it out and it took about 10 seconds - not bad Can I recommend 1 thing? Maybe have like a buffer popup every time someone searches something - because it's actually hard to know if it's doing anything until it actually loads. If you get what I mean. Just a little Idea. and another quick thing - I searched "YOU" and it came up with this: Well from me to you flagger, have a fucked up weekend and just remember i said - FU*K YOU FU*K YOU FU*K YOU FU*K YOU FU*K YOU FU*K YOU FU*K YOU FU*K YOU FU*K YOU FU*K YOU FU*K YOU FU*K YOU FU*K YOU FU*K YOU FU*K YOU FU*K YOU FU*K YOU FU*K YOU FU*K [...] and all other results were the same so not very nice! And if I search "You Tube" nothing close to that comes up!
Hey thanks a lot for the review. I must say I am not too happy with my search results speed yet. I am working on it as we speak. The search engine has only been online for almost 4 days, it's going to take 26 more days before the database hits its plateau (ads are deleted after 30 days) so I have a lot of work to do on search result speed. An ajax loader of some sort does make sense to show the page is actually doing something, I am really hoping to get my search speeds near instant though - they need to be. You brought up a very good point, I searched for "you" and seen what you did. I at the very least need to hide bad words so Adsense doesn't start hassling me for that. I notice most of the time Adsense ads won't even show on pages that contain swear words. Hopefully by this evening I can figure out what is slowing my search results down, I have no prior experience with elasticsearch so I am learning as I go.
Good stuff! Glad I could help - I'm sure this will be a great search engine, it has a lot of potential!
Just an update, I have upgraded my servers and have made a lot of tweaks to improve performance and speed. Still need to work on bad word filtering and I need to add an 18+ gateway for the personals section.