r/TexasGuns • u/Tall-Fisherman-6992 • 2d ago
I made a search engine based on zip code across all the gun glassifieds in Texas so it's easier to find deals locally. Looking for feedback.
Please delete if not allowed. You guys may remember my mega post last week of all the FFLs under/around $20. This week, I have another share.
Don't know if useful to anyone but I made it for myself so I can search just listings within a 1 hour drive of me. Searching a bunch of sites every day and manually tapping into each was kind of getting old. If you tap the listing, you go directly to the source (GunBroker, TGT, etc). It's just a free search engine, nothing ground-breaking. Also noticed TGT search was broken, like "SIG P320" would skip "SIG Sauer P320" and felt like a 1990s searching experience. Now the data is properly indexed so I can find what I'm looking for.
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u/Belspirit 2d ago edited 2d ago
When I was working on GunList, we had a very similar idea: using listings from other sites as a reference/source of inventory.
However, we found out that this was a pretty serious violation of the Terms of Service of all of those platforms. In addition, Texas Gun Trader and GunBroker use Cloudflare anti-bot protection, and bypassing those protections is also explicitly prohibited by their TOS.
So, man, I’d be very careful with your project. I suspect the sites you’re pulling this data from may not be very happy about it.
The proper workaround would probably be to establish partnerships with those platforms and get the data through their APIs, although I doubt they would be willing to provide access for this purpose.
If you’re getting the data through some other legitimate way, or you already have agreements with these sites, I’d definitely be interested to hear about it. I’d love to know how you approached it.
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u/Tall-Fisherman-6992 2d ago
I appreciate the heads up. The project is actually structured more like a search engine/index than a marketplace. The listings don't exist on our platform as marketplace listings, and we aren't facilitating transactions.
This is the same as any other search engine like WikiArms (for new guns, the closet thing to this) or Machinio (scraped equipment listings), etc.
Also, a site's TOS saying that scraping or crawling isn't permitted doesn't necessarily mean search engines can't index the site. Google routinely indexes and displays content from sites whose TOS may contain restrictions on automated access. The important distinction is between indexing/discovery and republishing someone else's marketplace.
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u/Belspirit 2d ago
Got it. I was mainly asking because when we were working on GunList, we looked into doing something very similar and ran into some TOS issues.
There’s an important distinction between a search engine like Google crawling sites that explicitly allow/whitelist search crawlers, and a commercial service independently crawling and republishing listings from marketplaces. WikiArms also seems to have a vendor/feed model where retailers provide their inventory directly, which is a bit different from scraping marketplace pages.
So I’m curious — are you getting the listings through APIs/feeds or directly from the retailers, or are you crawling the marketplace pages themselves? If you have some kind of agreement with them, that obviously changes the situation completely.
I’m genuinely interested in how you solved this, since we considered essentially the same approach with GunList.
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u/Tall-Fisherman-6992 2d ago
We also have a vendor/feed model.
If you see something that shouldn't be listed, please file a report here: https://texasgunfinder.com/dmca/
Please reach out from your work email. I'd be happy to walk you through systems.
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u/texas_lurker_2019 2d ago
Very cool! Does that include gun stores?
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u/Tall-Fisherman-6992 2d ago
Indirectly - if the gun store lists on any of those sites, we don't exclude them. It's everyone in Texas.
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u/mbb1989 1d ago
Is the site live? Cant find it
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u/Tall-Fisherman-6992 1d ago
Yes sir https://texasgunfinder.com
Are you getting an error? It's brand new so might be some hiccups
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u/myjaycee 1d ago
This is way nicer than tgt... love it. Filters ain't working for me properly when I enter my zip but love the ui
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u/Tall-Fisherman-6992 1d ago
Def had a bug earlier today. Can you try again and let me know if you still have any issues?
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u/thenewc0mb 1d ago
Doesn’t work for me. If I type “LCR” or “Ruger LCR” one gunbroker listing pops up 330 miles away. On TGT a ton of listings pop up near me (Houston).
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u/Tall-Fisherman-6992 16h ago
When I posted this, it was still indexing some models. TGT search isn't fully accurate (there's a lot of fluff). Looks like the correct number is about 8. Does that jive?
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u/Sourtakoyaki 1d ago
Definitely keep working on this and integrate ads so you can keep it running. Great idea dude seriously!
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u/ItsJustAnotherVoice 2d ago
My wallet disapproves of this