Today over the lunch I had a very interesting conversation with my team mate on the issue related to the duplicate posting of an ad (specifically Cars in this case) in multiple cities.
Problem we discussed :”Whenever you search for a car, you get the same car dealers who are offering the same product in multiple cities, and how to avoid it?”, the problem’s solution that I provided was this: Whenever someone post the product on craigslist, and want his ad appears in the city-based search other than the base-city where the car is located, they can tag other “Cities” in there posting, instead of going ahead and with little change posting the same ad in multiple cities. So whenever the user is trying to search there local-city offerings in Craigslist they will be able to see that tagged posting as well.
There are two issues here: One is related to the poster, how we can change there behavior, so do not post the same posting in different cities. Second tackling the search result, and how we can improve it. Let me walk you through the sample scenario
Posting Scenario:
Let say you are the “ABC Car Dealer” and want to post Acura MDX 2004 that is available in San Francisco North Beach Area, so you posted with the following detail:
“Locatoin: North Beach, San Francisco, CA”,
“Post Title: Acura MDX 2004 – 100,000 Miles”,
“Description: Fully loaded Acura MDX 2004, comes with DVD Player, and fully functional Navigation System, call 415-123-4567″
“Price: 15,000″
“Photos: 5 Photos Attached”
Now lets add this field too:
“Tag Specific Cities (10 cities only): San Jose, Fremont, Hayward, Santa Clara, Palo Alto, Oakland, Union City, Mountain View, San Ramon, Dublin, Richmond”
Search Scenario
Lets move to the Mr. Alan who is looking for an MDX specifically from 2004, because his family is grown up, and now he need little big car, preferably 7 seater, because he expecting some other family members visiting him time to time, and he is living with his wife, and two children who are under 3, and living with his family in Hayward.
Now lets see how he will do his search, assuming (it is just based on my preliminary self-applied search scenarios). He will first try this approach 1) Searching for MDX in San Francisco Bay Area and he will be presented with the following search result:
Now let say he just want to browse the offering in his local area due to his limited commute ability in weekdays.
By providing the “Tag local cities” to the Ad Poster we recommend a way to reduce the “Multiple Duplicate Posting by same dealer for the same offering”. Second thing we enhanced the search result too.
What do you think, how you can solve it? I am sure there must be more innovative way to solve that “Multiple Duplicate Posting” (MDP) on CraigsList.org.
