| I have built something very similar to this is the past, here are a couple of observations: Scraping: - Dealer web sites are run by a handful of different data brokers, for the most part if you find a good way to scrape one (say dealer who uses http://www.dealer.com/ than you can extend your scraper to get others) - Dealer web sites, in general, are horrible to view. - Learn to love VIN explosion/decoding - http://www.researchmaniacs.com/VIN/VIN-Decoder.html the dealers enter features in so many different ways, it is your best chance to normalize the data. - Normalize the ext. color, create a distinct list of all the crazy colors of car makers give their cars and all the short hand dealers give the colors. Create a map of the colors and apply when scraping - Scraping is like farming, a lot of initial work, but there is constant upkeep for changing sites Display: - User's don't want to search by city as much as what is close to them, you should geocode the dealerships and display distance. For instance if I search West Des Moines, I would expect inventory in Des Moines also to come up - Add searching by zip code, you can easily find database of the centroids. It can also be a cheap way of geocoding the dealerships - Switch Mileage to use miles instead of KM, it looks like most of the inventory is in the US an that is what the user will expect. - Use a ip2geo to set the initial location of the search, right now it looks like it is all over the place, check to see if the browser supports geo location and optionally set the initial search by that |
For geolocation searches, we auto detect a users location. I cannot guarantee the accuracy of a users location as the geo data source is a free version. You can however easily select the miles to increase the radius of your search.