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Feuds: Jason Calacanis and Dave Naylor in scrap over scrapingAugust 9th, 2007 at 2:06 pmSource:Valleywag Gmail may be introducing larger mailboxes. Of course, Google’s 10 GB seems paltry compared to Yahoo and AOL’s new unlimited-email storage. [Infectious Greed]
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Aftervote ostensibly tackles the same goal as Mahalo — improving the quality of search results. In addition to human editors, a feature it shares with Mahalo, Aftervote pulls results from the leading search engines and allows users to vote on the best results — something people with propeller hats call “metasearch.” It also provides rankings from the leading search engines and other sources to help the user evaluate the quality of links. This is what Calacanis “thinks” is “illegal” — though by “illegal,” he just means a violation of competing search engines’ terms of service: inside info: i think aftervote will be shut down soon for breaking the Terms of Service of Google, Yahoo, etc. Metasearch is illegal But as Jason Duke points out (with his rear end), metasearch is simply scraping data available on the Web. Google and every other search engine does it to Web pages. Aftervote does it and so, for that matter, does Mahalo, Duke argues. Dave Naylor responds similarly on his own blog: Hahaha Jason you look all worried mate, http://twitter.com/jasoncalacanis, Drug smuggling is illegal, Meta search engines aren’t, But what is making the Google Boys jump around is Search results in side search results, and correct me if I’m wrong but should that mean Mahalo shouldn’t be listed ?? Jason attempts to play nice while still holding his line, with a clarification of what “illegal” means, in Naylor’s comments: I love the idea of syndicating the ranking information form Google, Yahoo, and Ask. However, I was told specifically that it is against the terms of service and that they would take action against folks doing meta search. It you look in their terms of service they say it’s not allowed. To which, Naylor responds with some of his own “inside” trash talk: Jason: Just because you cant get access, does not mean nobody else can. In regards to google, we do have permission, same with alexa, compete and stumbleupon- at MSN and yahoo, they could not grant “permission” but also promised there would be no issues, and that many others did this. As I wrote before- Perhaps google does not want you bringing down the quality of there image any more than you have, with all the negative press mahalo gets (especially from the VC community- I overheard some guys from clearstone saying that you must have been on crack when you pitched it to them) Which leaves Calacanis incredulous but conciliatory (mostly): Google really gave permission to pull their data? Interesting… do you know who at Google gave the greenlight for pulling their data? I had a very senior person there say don’t do it (I’ll find out if they want to go public with that statement)… With this battle apparently over (and Calacanis scrambling to duplicate Aftervote’s “illegal” functionality), we anxiously await the next compelling dispute between the creators of these otherwise deadly boring search engines.
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