United Classifieds — Bazar.sk & Autobazar.sk Classified Portals

Challenge

Bazar.sk and Autobazar.sk are among the most visited Slovak websites. Processing thousands of new listings daily, full-text search across millions of records, and maintaining high performance during peak periods (particularly the Christmas season on Bazar.sk) presented significant technical challenges. At the same time, it was necessary to share a common codebase between multiple portal brands while preserving their individual specifics.

Solution

Martin Abaffy contributed to the development of Slovakia’s largest classified advertising portals within the United Classifieds group. The platform covers the complete process from listing creation, through advanced search with complex filtering, user account management, buyer-seller messaging, to advertising systems.

A key part of the work was optimizing database queries for full-text search across millions of listings and ensuring consistent performance across all portal brands. The shared codebase enables efficient sharing of functionality between Bazar.sk, Autobazar.sk, Nehnutelnosti.sk, and Reality.sk, while each portal retains its own specific features.

Technologies

The system is built on the Symfony framework in PHP, providing a robust foundation for the extensive application. PostgreSQL serves as the primary database with optimized indexes and queries for fast full-text search. The architecture is designed with horizontal scaling in mind to handle traffic surges during peak periods without performance degradation for end users.