[imp]

I'm not sure who your target audience is. I've searched for apartments, a car, and a house. Every time I used a spreadsheet to keep track of those things and it worked great. From my quick look at your site, that's all you really seem to be offering. I'm not sure what extra value you're adding.

[oms2010]

I hear you, and thanks for the feedback.

The idea of this webapp however is to do things more than that. You could say some people prefer using even bookmarks or in my case sometimes I used to use notepad for keeping track of car ads for example.

But the websites has some advantages.

1) It parses out data for you automatically [unlike excel or notepad], like car mileage, color, price, etc (or in the case of other types of searches - parses out relevant information like monthly rent, number of bedrooms,etc) (which allows the user to really sort and compare all the options)

2) With future enhancements it will automatically detect ads which have expired from everything you saved (not easily done with bookmarks)

3) Also it can be accessed anywhere, being a web application

4) But most importantly it saves one time to look through everything, eg. all options.

For people who really take their time to make decisions when buying certain items like a used car, an apartment rental, or something else, it would be useful to be able to really compare everything you found for things like best price or lowest mileage across all ads you found from different websites.

Try doing that in notepad or with bookmarks and it quickly sucks up your time (which was one of my main personal motivations for creating it).

[imp]

Cool, sounds like you have a lot of features there. I didn't know about the parsing part. What I would love is if you would poll those sites daily and then alert me whenever a car of a certain model is listed for a specific mileage and price. That would be amazing. It sounds like you have the parsing part already done.

[oms2010]

Yeah. The parsing works for websites that are 'monitored' by organizemysearch.com (and more will be added as the website grows). So if you paste in a car ad url from cars.com it will parse the basic info for you (eg. mileage, price, make, model, etc).

The advantage here is the user can add their own fields which they think are relevant to a car search. So someone could add something like "my comfort level in the backseat" and anytime they add another car ad they could specify something like 'good','average','bad' which will be associated with that car ad so in the end they can sort things very easily and weigh their options better.

As for your alert idea, I can see that being an add-on product perhaps. However I know that most of the major new/used car websites provide alerting capabilities based on certain criteria, so that functionality may already exist.

[getonit]

That you used a spreadsheet puts you in an incredibly small minority. His target audience is going to be those that can see (or will instantly recognise when shown) the benefits of such, but without the motivation to take on the hassle(1) of organising it themselves - people who keep it in their heads, or scribble on whatever scraps of paper etc. they have to hand.

Take the endless 'to-do list' type sites as a comparison: They basically offer nothing (or are not generally used for anything) that couldn't be handled by a carrying around a small notepad with a pen shoved down the spine.

(1) Minor hassle it may be, but magnitude means nothing to a great many people.

[imp]

I may be in the minority (not incredibly small though), but if someone isn't comfortable using a spreadsheet, they're probably not going to be comfortable using a web app either. Spreadsheets are pretty ubiquitous.

[getonit]

I didn't mean comfort (although I suspect that it may come into it more than you give credit for).

I meant hassle; effort - should I just scribble notes, or will I spend a couple of minutes thinking about what info I want to record before I see it on screen? I could knock up a quick spreadsheet of the relevant comparison points pretty quickly, but I wouldn't bother if there was a pen and paper in sight. If I already had a spreadsheet that I'd used previously, though, I'd use it again. I'd use the website in question if it was equivalent to that, and free. (Sorry OP, I can't think of anything you could add that would make it worth coughing up for, for me at least.)

It's fickle, sure, and it's a very minor difference in effort. That's what people do when they're not really giving much thought to what they're doing, IMHO and IMHE.