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OK, it took me a few days to get the play on words (At a Glance - AutoGlance) but that's not all that's clever about the site, which is why I invited its co-creator Keith Pagello to do an email Q&A about his new website that launched in the middle of January 2012.
He has some interesting aspects to his website and is even in the process of applying for a patent for one of its algorithms. This used car business can have some pretty heady stuff.
Here are his responses to some questions I put to him:
Q. What is AutoGlance? What was the impetus for starting it? How long did it take to develop it?
A. AutoGlance is a very different approach to used car search. First off, we aggregate listings from a number of sites (like AutoTrader and Cars.com) so that you don't have to perform the same search multiple times. Second, we have a unique interface where we graphically display things like the car's color, mileage, and price so that you don't have to go reading through a blob of text. Third, we have a really neat feature that can hide dozens of cars if they are determined to be worse deals than a similar listing. It sounds like something obvious, but it's an important feature that's missing from all other car search sites, and it can easily save you from looking through 50+ cars that you most likely have no intention of buying.
We've even applied for a patent on the algorithm we use to do this.
We began work on AutoGlance about 4 months ago and just launched publically last week.
Read more about buying a used car online to protect yourself.
Q. Who is behind AutoGlance? What are your backgrounds?
A. AutoGlance is just myself and my co-founder, Khine Lin. I take care of everything that's car-related and he takes care of all the coding. He built the front and back ends of the site from the ground up which is no small feat; we went through at least a dozen iterations before reaching an interface that we felt was ready to launch.
Q. Does the Internet need another car-search service like AutoGlance? What sets you apart from all of the other choices out there?
A. We really feel that AutoGlance is fundamentally different from any other car-search site that currently exists. Other sites give you a long list of hundreds of cars that match your search criteria, and you're forced to sit there looking through them one by one, page by page.
AutoGlance shows you every result on a single page, and we use icons to visually represent the most important features of each listing. You don't have to read anything; you can just look at the screen and quickly identify which cars are most appealing to you. We think that we've taken the tedious process of searching for a used car and made it into something enjoyable.
[Editor's note: here are some sites I recommend for used car buying online.]
<<p> Q. How did you pick the websites you did? What made you want to associate with Vehix, AutoTrader and Cars.com? Why use AutoGlance to search all of these sites?
A. We decided to start off with the bigger sites that most people are already familiar with. Expanding our aggregating reach is definitely a top priority at this point. Next on the list is eBay. There's also a bunch of lesser-known sites that have really large listing databases as well; you can expect those to start showing up on AutoGlance within a few weeks.
Q. How do you make money from this website? What is its revenue source?
A. Making money is at the very bottom of our priorities at this point. There's a number of really cool features that we're working on at the moment; we'd much rather spend our time developing them before we spend any time looking for revenue. We're really committed to keeping our interface clean and uncluttered; you certainly won't see any banner-style advertisements showing up on AutoGlance. Whatever revenue stream we ultimately decide on will be unintrusive and perhaps even invisible to our users.
Q. One feature I really like is the graph that shows the cars ranked by mileage and age. It's a clean, simple way to spot what you want. What's the thinking behind the chart?
It's pretty simple: The greater the car's mileage, the further the car is positioned to the right. This setup makes it real easy to spot the good deals (lower price and off the left) and to ignore the bad deals (higher priced and off to the right). There's not much thinking required from the user, your eyes kind of just gravitate towards the better deals!
Q. What are the future plans for AutoGlance? Where does expansion come from?
A. We really want to focus on expanding the breadth of our aggregation. There's dozens of lesser known sites that we're working with to get their listings displayed on AutoGlance. We don't care if a site only has a few hundred listings; we still want them to include them in our aggregation.
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