So, late last year there was a moderate-sized kerfuffle among people who pay attention to these things when uber local classified site craigslist asked classified search engine Oodle to stop crawling its site, saying it was putting too great a load on their servers. The craigslist community seemed split, with some uncomfortbale that 3rd parties were profiting off craigs listings and others calling craigslist hypocrites for trying to limit access to their information.
Either way, it was a big blow to Oodle. Oodle seems still to be growing, but losing craigslist from the results it returns definitely hurt its appeal.
Well, now there's a new classified and auction search site called mPire (mentioned here by Greg Sterling). mPire shows the craigslist logo, along with Yahoo, eBay and others, and lists them elsewhere on its site as partners. (BTW, at first glance, the site seems pretty useful) But what are we missing here? Is there a partnership? If so, what's the nature of it? Why would craigslist be (if, indeed it is) OK with this arrangement after l'affaire Oodle kicked up so much dust? Anyone?
ConsensusBlog 