I had already written the code to crawl carwale.com. Just completed the code to crawl cartradeindia. The crawler is still working at the moment and collecting information.

Issues faced and resolved

  1. The same model is referred to as differently on carwale and cartradeindia. E.g ‘Maruti’ in Cartradeindia while ‘Maruti Suzuki’ in carwale
  2. Prices and KMs run are in text format in cartradeindia. Made use of simple text replace function to get rid of the commas. Making use of number_format function to display those beautiful numbers on search results page.
  3. Original date of registration was too difficult to get on cartradeindia. It was going to consume too much of resources. Dropped from the frontend for now. Will add later if there is enough demand.

What next

I have to add the next 7-8 used cars site to the search engine.

Till now the search is happening through form posts. I shall need to replicate the functionality through get function as well. This will enable those city specific pages like used cars in Mumbai to start working.

I got several new listing on my used bikes website. I am excited about taking on the existing competition. Will need to spend some time cleaning up the confusing title structure.

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