Classifieds Search Engine

[eluser]Gavin Vickery[/eluser]
Hey Everybody,

Just wanted to announce the launch of a project I've been working on for some time. Its a classifieds search engine built entirely with CodeIgniter.

IslandFind - The classifieds search engine

My spider goes out and indexes all major classifieds sites on Vancouver Island, BC (where I live) and updates my system every 30 minutes. At the time of this writing, my index is up to 31,773 listings.

I would appreciate any comments or feedback on the system. What do you think of the functionality? Did you run into any bugs? Any feature ideas?

Thanks!

[eluser]duellsy[/eluser]
Sorry man... it's dead


Error Number: 1194

Table 'cache_tbl' is marked as crashed and should be repaired

SELECT COUNT(*) AS numrows FROM `cache_tbl`

[eluser]Gavin Vickery[/eluser]
LOL, my spider was doing too many inserts and crashed MySQL. Its fixed now. Thanks duellsy!

[eluser]Michael Wales[/eluser]
Do you mind if ask some details on your spider? What was it programmed in? Is it just parsing data from specific sites or does it "intelligently" define a classified list from the web as a whole? Are your parsing RSS feeds or just HTML?

Site looks great. I've already started using it to try and find a few Christmas gifts. If you can get this in front of TechCrunch, Mashable, CenterNetworks' eyes quickly you may be in for a pretty profitable holiday season.

[eluser]Gavin Vickery[/eluser]
@walesmd

The spider is written in PHP. It uses a combination of regular expressions based on the data I need to collect. It uses RSS feeds to start the crawl (its a lot easier to crawl links that way) and moves onto each positive classified.

The regex patterns have been written specifically for each site the spider crawls, but can be easily expanded to fit any other patterns. This way its more of a direct crawl with ease of expansion as needed, as apposed to web-wide crawling like Google.

Thanks for the Ideas on TechCrunch etc. I'll contact them today.

Cheers.

[eluser]Michael Wales[/eluser]
I completely overlooked the fact that this was a local thing to your area. I think if you expanded it on a national/contentintal/global level you would get much more attention.

Maybe cover your track by claiming this is a limited beta period for your area and you are working towards the expansions.

Nonetheless - it appears to be a great service.

Side note: For some reason your design makes me thing of iconfinder.net. I'm not insinuating anything - I just found it interesting - great clean design. I love it.

[eluser]Gavin Vickery[/eluser]
I have planned an expansion, but I wanted to launch this version in the local area to see if it takes. My first move is all of Canada, and then the US. I'll see where it goes from there.

As you can imagine, I've coded and designed everything myself, so it takes a bit of time to implement features.

Thanks, again for your input.