Calling Web Developers, I have an idea... Options

[McMark]

I had an idea that I can't implement, but I think is good. It would be cool if we could have a place where people could enter their used parts sale prices and condition. We could then get the mean value biased by condition to give a market value for used parts. There is a lot more complexity that could be added to the algorithm, but what do you think of the core idea?

[lapuwali]

Someone may list "2.0 SS Heat Exchangers". Someone else may list "Exhaust Thingies". Without significant manual cleansing of the data, it wouldn't work.

People who list things with bad titles also either don't sell the item (so they don't count), or they sell for a very low price (lucky buyer). The way this problem is solved is buy looking at a lot of items over time, and just averaging out the prices. You'll find that the prices tend to cluster around the average, and the outliers can simply be ignored. There's always some group of idiots who get into a bidding war and pay 2x the going price for something, and some idiot who lists a $200 item with no reserve and a $1 starting price and misspells the name so badly only one person finds it, and gets it for a buck. But that's not the norm.

Using common search terms as the "key" (like exhaust, not heat exchangers) will get good results, for the seller, the buyer, and the scanner. Sellers know this, which is why you'll see titles like:

"914 912 911 VW 2.0 Fuchs wheels, set of four Porsche Ghia"

Trying to hit the widest possible audience. For the buyer, using the smallest possible set of the shortest possible search terms will also gain the best results. Search for "914 wheel", not "Porsche 914 wheels", and you'll get all of the auctions where someone misspelled Porsche, or left it off. The search engine does a pattern match on sub-words (wheel matches wheels, but wheels only matches wheels).