Oodle Listings: Doing Math, So You Don't Have To

I liked Oodle when I looked at it the first time around. I liked it so much, in fact, that I bestowed upon it the coveted honor of PC Magazine's Web Site of the Week. The concept behind the site is fairly simple: classified ads from across the Web and are aggregated, allowing you to search for, say, a car, an apartment, a box turtle, or a girlfriend from multiple sites, all from the comfort of a single search engine. Now that, friends, is convenience.






The Oodle folks gave me a call last week, to let me know that their Web Site of Week-winning service is getting more winninger, starting today. The site has launched a feature called Oodle Index. The service is set to work initially with the site's car listings, providing, what is essentially a real-time, location-based version of Kelley Blue Book, using the listings aggregated by the site. This means that, when I look on their site for that 2005 Maserati that I've been saving up for, I can find the current average price in my area for that make and model. $94,250? I'll take two.

Below the average price is a graph, showing you a more specific breakdown of the car in your area. A series of yellow bars tell you how many cars are available in each range in listings posted in the past six months (broken down, in this case in intervals of $5k). The green bars show the amount that are actually currently available in each range. Clicking on either one of the bars will direct you to the cars offered in the range, and will re-center the graph's breakdown around the range that you specified. What? There are only two models left in my region in the $85k price range? I better hurry. Maybe I can pick up one or two during my lunch hour.

The feature is certainly a cool one, and a good, quick way to gauge what is a realistic price for you to pay for a vehicle, with the sort of immediacy that something like Kelley Blue Book can't offer. It will be interesting to see the tool as it is applied to more aspects of the search. Living in New York, I'd be specifically interested in taking a look at the feature in the context of apartment searches. How much more is the average price of an apartment in midtown Manhattan than in Queens? My guess that you ought to opt for the latter, if you're looking to start saving for that Maseratti.

The real question on everyone's minds, however (and by everyone, I'm referring specifically to myself, of course), is how long until they apply the feature to the personals section of the site? Move over, HotEnough.com, Oodle Index of area hotness, here we come!