I wrote a scraper for myself only to keep an eye on several used truck websites. I was able to do this for craigslist, so I could run it every couple days and check the nearest 75 cities, the list of truck ads, filtering on/out certain keywords, and the pages for the interesting trucks, making a report for myself to help find the vehicle I want.
I could not do this for any of other several large sites advertising used trucks, like commercialtrucker.com, truckpaper.com, and machinio.com. I kept bumping into artificial javascript and captcha limitations that were not worth my time to try to work around.
The thing is that I will probably find what I want on a craigslist site that I can scrape, I'm getting a lot of great info from them, and I'm not going to bother with any of the ad-based sites, it takes to olong to run all the manual searches. They have effectively done a disservice to their (presumably paying) customers who want to sell their vehicles.
If AutoTempest covers your search criteria, I’ve found them to be excellent to do repetitive searches. Somewhat fortunately for you, they suck for craigslist searches, but have great coverage for all the other major sites.
I could not do this for any of other several large sites advertising used trucks, like commercialtrucker.com, truckpaper.com, and machinio.com. I kept bumping into artificial javascript and captcha limitations that were not worth my time to try to work around.
The thing is that I will probably find what I want on a craigslist site that I can scrape, I'm getting a lot of great info from them, and I'm not going to bother with any of the ad-based sites, it takes to olong to run all the manual searches. They have effectively done a disservice to their (presumably paying) customers who want to sell their vehicles.