Legalities of search/indexing? Autotrader/PH classifieds etc
Discussion
I'm considering putting together a car search tool where you enter your details (make/model etc) then it searches ebay, autotrader, PH etc and you get your results in the standard "classifieds" type way with a small snippet of perhaps the advert and a single picture from the originating site. When you click the advert it takes you to the actual advert on the host site.
Not sure if anything like this exists, it would just be for my personal use to save browsing the three sites one at a time like I currently do. However if this would be of use to others I'd host it publicly - however I'm unsure of the copyright issues (if any?) here.
I know ebay allows, and even encourages publishers directing traffic to their site (they even provide an API for it).
Am I missing anything here?
Thanks.
Not sure if anything like this exists, it would just be for my personal use to save browsing the three sites one at a time like I currently do. However if this would be of use to others I'd host it publicly - however I'm unsure of the copyright issues (if any?) here.
I know ebay allows, and even encourages publishers directing traffic to their site (they even provide an API for it).
Am I missing anything here?
Thanks.
Prizam said:
No different to Google indexing search results.
That was my initial thought, but then it's not actually the same. With google you search for "autotrader" then go to their site. I think if google provided a way to directly search autotrader and presented the results on its own page (thereby earning advertising revenue from pageviews) I think autotrader would object to this as they would lose out of their own advert views/clicks. I appreciate they take money from people paying to advertise their car, but I suspect a reasonable % of their revenue comes from adverts on the site. 
Emphasis mine:
AutotraderTCs said:
In consideration of our agreeing to permit you to use the Website to search our database of vehicles, you agree that you will only use, reproduce and print materials comprising the results of such searches for your own personal, non-commercial purposes. In particular, you must not use the contact details provided by private advertisers of vehicles to contact such advertisers other than in connection with a genuine enquiry relating to the purchase by you of the vehicle in question.
http://www.autotrader.co.uk/common/mytrader/terms-...your problems will most likely be technical not legal.
If you scrape a website respecting the robots file and re-index the result you should have no issues, legal or technical, this is what search engines do.
If you try and hammer a site's front end resulting in hundreds of page requests per second you will likely come up against rate limiting or possibly be blocked without an agreement with the site.
Big sites provide APIs, they can give you access to their database in a way they control with no impact on their webservers.
If you scrape a website respecting the robots file and re-index the result you should have no issues, legal or technical, this is what search engines do.
If you try and hammer a site's front end resulting in hundreds of page requests per second you will likely come up against rate limiting or possibly be blocked without an agreement with the site.
Big sites provide APIs, they can give you access to their database in a way they control with no impact on their webservers.
ging84 said:
your problems will most likely be technical not legal.
If you scrape a website respecting the robots file and re-index the result you should have no issues, legal or technical, this is what search engines do.
If you try and hammer a site's front end resulting in hundreds of page requests per second you will likely come up against rate limiting or possibly be blocked without an agreement with the site.
Big sites provide APIs, they can give you access to their database in a way they control with no impact on their webservers.
I can't see anything in the PH or AT robots file to prevent automated access to the relevant pages. Ebay provide an API into their search so should be the simplest.If you scrape a website respecting the robots file and re-index the result you should have no issues, legal or technical, this is what search engines do.
If you try and hammer a site's front end resulting in hundreds of page requests per second you will likely come up against rate limiting or possibly be blocked without an agreement with the site.
Big sites provide APIs, they can give you access to their database in a way they control with no impact on their webservers.
RE page requests; it will only be the same quantity as if a user was searching on their actual site. I'm not planning on scanning their sites and saving an index to my server, just doing an ad-hoc proxy-search passed on from the search form on my site.
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