Filed under: Business — Scott @ 4:45 pm
Its easy to aggregate all the different Craigslist markets and search them. Craigslist doesn’t allow meta search though under the idea that they are only trying to promote local markets. They have even actively tried to combat meta search tools that provide that capability. Why is that? What is lost by providing that seperate feature? Why would you fight your most “fanatic” users by not providing a feature so many want?
Only Craig knows the answer to those questions. He is only restricting his regular users capabilities to out spam by disallowing a public meta tool. All the power users already have meta search tools, autoposters, and auto responders. Its as if they have their head in the sand.
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I just did a stint at an online automotive site and they would get their used car data from vast.com, which was somehow able to crawl all of Craigslist’s used car posts, and resell them to other sites. But checking out vast lately, I noticed that all their listings were from dealers. I think they bet their whole model on screen scraping the data.