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CarFetch

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#2
The only 3rd party that does not get New Vehicle pics from our stores is autotrader. On carfetch our new cars do not have images. So I think its safe to assume they are either scraping autotrader or they are owned by them. I could be wrong though.

I have to say, the site is blazing fast though.
 
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#5
How to make your site this fast:
  1. Host everything, including your DNS, at AWS (Amazon)
  2. Use S3 file hosting with cloudfront caching for all images
  3. Lazy load all images - nothing loads until it's on the user's screen, allowing pages to finish loading blazingly fast
  4. Offload all searches to elastic search or another rapid indexing hosted search
  5. Use RDS for dedicated database storage
  6. Combine all your CSS/JS files into a single file that gets cached at the browser level
What's interesting with these guys is that they're hotlinking images from the dealer sites and linking directly to VDPs - that means they're scraping dealer sites or getting a feed from an advertising source. I don't personally know any classifieds sites that link back to the dealer's own VDP.

They also have some pretty good SEO pages setup: http://carfetch.com/ford/fusion/2013

Somebody knows what they're doing - hopefully they're scraping legally because I like how simple this is.
 
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#6
You hit the nail on the head, Craig! We have done those exact same things, except utilizing the Microsoft Azure cloud, rather than AWS. But it's all in the same ballpark. The key is to start with the cloud to gain all the benefits of cloud computing: access to nearly unlimited power and storage, CDNs, SQL database geo-replication, etc.

It's strange that they are hotlinking images, like you mentioned. What that is doing is offloading the hosting and data transfer costs to the third party website providers, which is not playing nice. AKA, CarFetch gets to show images for free, while the providers pay the hosting/transfer costs. We download vehicle images once and store them on our end, backed by a CDN. That's playing nice.

And FYI, MotoMiner is a search engine for vehicles and has been linking directly to dealer VDPs since it launched in November 2014. We think that's best for both the dealer and the shopper.
 
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#7
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