I know PG posted that YC would like to fund a Craigslist competitor. The issue is that it's hard to build the number of people needed to reach a critical mass. Likewise, it's not that eBay is so great, it's just the only place with that many people.
The CL search is really simple - really just whole word matches. That makes it hard to search for things that haven't been adopted by the CL community as keywords for items. I'm guessing this might be related to the amount of hardware they run. While search isn't that taxing a thing to do, it isn't necessarily easy (especially on CL's budget which doesn't rake in dough from VC or ads).
Think about comparing it to something like Digg. CL has more traffic (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/craigslist.org+digg.com/?me... - go to visitors->visits monthly and engagement->pages per visit). About 3.5 times the number of visits and about 10 times the number of pages per visit. So, CL is getting 35 times the amount of traffic of a major site like Digg. It's hard to scale up to 17.5 billion page views per month (24M per hour, 6,800 per second) - especially when you're not monetizing most of that. Comparatively, Digg is getting a mere 200 page views per second.
I'd love to see improvements to CL, but I feel like some of them would definitely require more hardware. CL wants to be independent with as little commercialness as possible. In the end, that leaves CL what it is - a bastion of whatever goes where it's also hard to find things.
Craigs is simple enough that most of its users can feel like they understand everything about it. Despite its being huge in users and content, this makes it feel small.
If a user feels like they understands a site, they don't mind spending time on it finding things. It is the opaque, confusing sites that have people run away after a few searches. The challenge for any competitor is finding a way to expand functionality while allowing the user to still feel like they understand exactly how everything works.
I would love to create a craigslist competitor. An improvement on craigslist would be a site which allowed the user to search for item, price, location, and time together - "yoga classes on Wednesdays in Berkeley for under $100" or "garage sales Saturday with car parts" etc. What, where, when, and how-much could be specified separately and orthogonally.
Remember, getting calendaring, location, price and category to work together is a tough problem. Also, making sure postings remain fresh is tough if you do anything other than craigslist's system of making everyone repost their content every two weeks. And you would have to be willing not to monetize any more than craigslist, 'cause the users can tell.
CL makes something like 50 million a year. I just don't believe they are incapable of fixing search. Hell Plenty of Fish runs on something like 6 servers + a CDN and offers a very structured advanced search.
I think this is just the typical case of someone being surprised by their success, and being too scared to change anything, in fear of driving users away.
CL can spend 5-10 million on infrastructure out of profits...w/o selling out, not that it would cost that much...they just choose not to.
The CL search is really simple - really just whole word matches. That makes it hard to search for things that haven't been adopted by the CL community as keywords for items. I'm guessing this might be related to the amount of hardware they run. While search isn't that taxing a thing to do, it isn't necessarily easy (especially on CL's budget which doesn't rake in dough from VC or ads).
Think about comparing it to something like Digg. CL has more traffic (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/craigslist.org+digg.com/?me... - go to visitors->visits monthly and engagement->pages per visit). About 3.5 times the number of visits and about 10 times the number of pages per visit. So, CL is getting 35 times the amount of traffic of a major site like Digg. It's hard to scale up to 17.5 billion page views per month (24M per hour, 6,800 per second) - especially when you're not monetizing most of that. Comparatively, Digg is getting a mere 200 page views per second.
I'd love to see improvements to CL, but I feel like some of them would definitely require more hardware. CL wants to be independent with as little commercialness as possible. In the end, that leaves CL what it is - a bastion of whatever goes where it's also hard to find things.