Hacker News

I aggregated 28 US Government auction sites into one search

90 points by scarsam 3 hours ago | 23 comments

1970-01-01 2 hours ago

US Gov auctions are great when you want 400 of something broken or want to travel through 3 states for a $1000 mil-spec kitchen sink.

83 2 hours ago

Or when you've been wanting to one up your neighbor's boat by buying a drug running speedboat with bullet holes.

cucumber3732842 56 minutes ago

Or want to get absolutely ripped off by the non-government sellers that are somehow allowed on those platforms. The whole point of Govdeals et al is that the seller is a known-ish quantity. If I wanted to roll the dice on garbage with fresh paint I'd be on Ritchie bros.

Govdeals managed services (or whatever they call it now) is just as questionable as 3rd party sellers on any given big bog store's ecommerce "platform".

xnx 2 hours ago

Clone of "GovAuctions" from 3 weeks ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662945

player_piano 2 hours ago

Thanks for tagging! I got a "traffic spike" notification from Hackernews for my site (https://govauctions.app) and wondered what was going on :-)

83 2 hours ago

Your site is awesome. I too am tired of checking five different government auction websites every day, each with a terrible interface from 2005.

player_piano 2 hours ago

Thank you. I think the highlight so far has been one of my friends buying an industrial lathe that he found on the site!

rovr138 2 hours ago

Curious, what are you using for notifications like this?

player_piano 2 hours ago

I am still on Vercel (yes I know, trying to migrate off...) and it gives you automated alerts when there are anomalous traffic spikes. Funnily enough, I have had about 10 scrapers from various places scraping the site in the last week.

xnx 2 hours ago

> I have had about 10 scrapers from various places scraping the site in the last week.

I hope you're adding some fictitious entries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry) to track where those scrapes might be going.

player_piano 58 minutes ago

This sounds like a fun Saturday morning creative writing activity - "lot of 150,000 surplus government Cybertrucks, lightly used"

kjs3 27 minutes ago

Sorry to derail...but have we now collectively realized Vercel is kinda crap? I missed the memo.

perdomon 14 minutes ago

Great idea. Seems to be experiencing the hug of death at the moment, though.

yodon 2 hours ago

Server load issues? Home page loads. Individual states don't seem to.

pwr1 36 minutes ago

Nice execution. How are you handling deduplication when the same asset shows up on multiple sites?

graybeardhacker 53 minutes ago

Looks like you got the Hacker News hug of death. "Oops Something went wrong

The server is under heavy load. Please try again in a moment. "

sjducb 2 hours ago

Cool idea, I tapped the vehicles / heavy equipment tabs expecting to be taken to listings. Nothing happened. Maybe these should all take you to a page that lets you sign up to see listings?

DevX101 2 hours ago

You need to cache search queries.

kdot 32 minutes ago

Missed the District of Columbia

bbstats 2 hours ago

First thing I searched was Pokemon cards and found items with bids at 50% higher than market value...either shill bidding or folks who are bidding blindly.

reactordev 2 hours ago

Surprised you even got it to load.

spate141 59 minutes ago

Not responding on states links. Maybe increase the cache and add another compute to server scaling

mintarex 18 minutes ago

[dead]

Xiaoher-C 2 hours ago

[flagged]

wotsdat 18 minutes ago

[dead]

zikduruqe 2 hours ago

Can I finally find a cosmoline packed Jeep in the original crate for $50? /s

I wish I had jumped on those offers back when they were in the back of Boys Life, Popular Mechanics, and SOF magazines back in the day.

scarsam 3 hours ago

[flagged]