Do you/How do you - set up repeating searches or reminders or alerts when looking to buy a weapon online/ Favorite online sites

Hornedfrogbbq · Friday at 11:17 AM

Do you all set up "alerts" or have ways of repeatedly searching Gunbroker/Guns International and other sites so that you are alerted when a new weapon that you might be interested in hits their site or do you go every day and recheck and recheck?

Also, do you have favorite sites to look for weapons? I mentioned last week or earlier this week that Rock Island's big premier auction is coming up and it is a place I have seen some guns trade at good values (although I've also seen stuff trade at what I would say is a premium to the overall market...typical auction...). I would hope we all know GB and GI and probably Champlain arms. Cabelas seems to have a steady stream of weapons coming in to them...i have no clue how to set up a repeating search on all their stores.

Northplains · Friday at 11:24 AM

Gunbroker is easy to set up automatic notifications for your search parameters. Just start your search and follow the steps to set it up.

Hornedfrogbbq · Friday at 12:01 PM

Northplains said:
Gunbroker is easy to set up automatic notifications for your search parameters. Just start your search and follow the steps to set it up.

I assume anything on GB is on GI and vice versa or is that naive?

Northplains · Friday at 12:05 PM

I’m not sure on that. I’ve only used gb. I’ve always had great luck finding oddball guns on gb. I know some people who have had issues with them but knock on wood I’ve never been burned.

Aaron N · Friday at 1:09 PM

Is there a way to pull from any site though? I’ve wondered the same.

K-man · Saturday at 2:54 PM

Just talk to your spouse about it when Alexa can hear it. You will have countless notifications quite soon..........
Usually a "want to buy" here will bring countless scammers to you.

odonata · Sunday at 7:41 AM

Hornedfrogbbq said:
Do you all set up "alerts" or have ways of repeatedly searching Gunbroker/Guns International and other sites so that you are alerted when a new weapon that you might be interested in hits their site or do you go every day and recheck and recheck?

I do daily rechecks. But as a professional computer nerd, I might be doing it a little differently than most people.

#1: I use a lot of filters to do a very narrow search. I'll often search for only recent items that have appeared in the last 48 hours to exclude items I looked at earlier. I also use a minus sign ("-") in front of words that I wanted excluded from the search. So in the search below, I'm looking for Rugers with the phrase LH in the description. But I'm excluding 7mm Rem Mags, the FTW model, ones with Zytel stocks, etc. to limit hits on items I'm not looking for. Whenever I get a result I'm not interested in like the abbreviated HNTR below, then I will add a -HNTR to the search phrase & update the bookmark to further refine the search.

#2: I group my searches in folders by category. Then I use the Open All Bookmarks feature by right-clicking on the folder. In the screenshot below, opening all of the bookmarks in the Guns International folder will run 14 searches all at once. Because the searches are so precise, most of them will return zero results since I'm often looking for needles in a haystack. I then use keyboard shortcut keys to toggle through them. Hitting the <CTRL><TAB> combo moves from tab to tab in my browser quickly. Hitting the <CTRL><F4> or <CTRL + W> keys will close the individual tab depending on which browser I'm using. So it only takes a few seconds to open all the searches & then a few more to close all of the screens with uninteresting results. In less than a minute, I can narrow down 50+ searches to about 4 or 5 pages of items worth looking at.

#3: I fired up a code editor & wrote a program to "read" various web pages & send me an email when something interesting pops up. I have a list of keywords that I'm looking for stored in a database table. I also have a list of keywords I want to exclude. If a posted item (usually used stuff in classifieds) appears that doesn't have excluded words, then I log that item in a database so I don't get sent another email later when I run the search again and then I check the item for a word I'm interested in. If the listing has that keyword, then I send myself an email. I have this program running on an automated job scheduler so it checks various websites for me every minute of the day. Here's an example of the code snippet that does most of that work for me: