A Better Craigslist?

Niall O'Higgins — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:13:43 +0000

Is Craigslist good enough? From finding a job to finding a new futon to finding romance, the lightweight, no-frills online classifieds site can probably help you. It’s a mostly-great, mostly-free service, with impressive critical mass.

However, at SnagMachine—a tiny, bootstrapping startup in the early stages—we think it’s time to improve on it.

The first problem we’ve identified is poor search results. Take these Craigslist results for “Powershot” for example:

Craigslist Search

The first result isn’t even a Powershot! Then we have batteries, chargers—for non-Powershot cameras—and other random items included in the results.

The reason for the poor results is simple: Craigslist doesn’t really understand what you’re looking for, or what sellers are selling. The Craigslist ad posting interface is easy, but doesn’t give sellers much help. Many ads lack even basic product details and often contain misleading or wrong information. This is a typical ad:

Canon Powershot Ad on Craigslist

Building Better Ads—Easily

What if Craigslist could understand what you were trying to sell and populate your ad with the right details? You could get a high quality, information rich ad with very little work!

Auto-complete for over 10,000 products

Snag Machine ad creation

Pre-built Ad Templates

Snag Machine pre-populated ad template

Copy & Paste Ad into eBay, CL, forums etc

Snag Machine Ad Copy & Paste

Easy, Low-cost, Ad Hosting

Snag Machine saved ad

Better Search

Not only would the ads be better—search would be better too, because the system would use the semantic data in the ads to match what the user is looking for. We’re not quite at that point, but we’re close!

What’s next

As stated at the beginning, we are still in the early stages of the project. We are focused currently on a set of tools to add value to existing sites such as CL, eBay, etc. We’re also working toward a standalone site which should have some very exciting product search and browsing capabilities, powered by semantic data. Finally we have some great ideas for tighter social network integration!

We are iterating as quickly as possible. Now, we would like your feedback. Use the site to build an ad and give us feedback (via email, comments below, or the UserVoice feedback tab on the site).

Is this a service you’d use? If not, why not? What else do you think we could do, to add value to your experience? What should we focus on?