Posted by player_piano 3 hours ago
It has historically been extremely tedious though: scanning dozens of janky sites which have interminable page loading times; back buttons take you all the way back to the homepage etc.
The site I built - GovAuctions - lets you search every government surplus auction at once. You can filter by location, category, and price, save items to a watchlist, and get alerts when new auctions match what you're looking for.
Let me know what you think, if you have any suggestions, and if you find any deals in your area!
Put the parameters into the url so searches can be bookmarked, like zip codes, terms, filters, and other aspects can be shared easily.
Description search both include (like i7, 16GB) which is good for electronics and exclude for example exclude "repair" or "needs repair" which is helpful for many things.
Category specific filters, vehicle millage range, year
Keywords like pickup, delivery, payment methods, etc.
You are probably already thinking along these lines for some of them, just an encouragement to implement. Yes categories can be fuzzy(commas, which word or plurals used, etc), so feel free to put the [beta] or [experimental] tag until a recipe that gets most of the stuff works.
Thanks for building this, I bookmarked it and already shared it with a few friends.
Update: This should now be working the intended way (ie for Georgia, showing only GA results when you click out, and filtering for the category within GA).
https://www.govauctions.app/auction/gsa-1-1-QSC-I-26-148-031
Let me filter and alert based on a distance, not just sort. e.g. "Lathe" within 100 miles of Baltimore. GovDeals lets you do this, but their distance filter is very inaccurate.
Once an item clicked back button returns you to a reset listing, so you cannot click and item go back and retain the last position you were looking at (tested on iPhone)