Funny little argument
August 9, 2007 on 10:18 am | In Blackhat SEO | 2 CommentsWell there is quite an amusing argument going on right now between David Naylor and his aftervote website and Jason Calacanis Mahalo
What is Aftervote?
Well dave I sent you a IM… I can’t be bothered to actually write a description. Put a shorter one on your site for a copy/paste job! Click here for the about aftervote.
What is Mahalo? (taken from mahalo.com , not written by me!)
Mahalo is the world’s first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven’t yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You can also suggest links for any of our search results.
The argument?
Jason C seems to be getting baited quite well from Dave. I don’t think Dave is really bothered about any of this but like the typical British, he loves an argument 
Jason C is arguing that the way aftervote is scraping search results is illegal and against various T&Cs. This is one thing which has always bugged me… when Google, Yahoo or MSN scrape your pages, cache them, take your images and make money out of all this by sticking adverts next to them and calling it a search engine no one has any problem with it. When I scrape your sites and put adverts next to the results I’m called a scraper or spammer or god knows what else. Wake up and smell the coffee! Anyway Jason D had a similar view and posted probably one of the funniest videos I have seen from an SEO… So check out the Jason D Mooney.
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Polarizing an issue is a cheap tactic to get people on your side. As you surely know, Google Cache only caches the text, not the images for one.
Also, the distinction between Google and any “keyword optimized page” is very clear: Google gives me (usually) a useful pointer to the resource I’m looking for. It is an additional step (most people I assume would rather go directly to the page they’re looking for rather than going the Google -> Webpage way), but it is a necessary step because of the amount of information we have. A “keyword page” almost never provides visitors with a value. It’s just an additional step (in the better case when it’s actually provides a link to the original source) or a roadblock when it doesn’t.
The issue with the terms of service is also much clearer than you make it out to be: contracts are secondary to the law, and if the law contains a fair use clause and your quoting is inside of those laws, a contract can not forbid you to do so, because it is against the law, and thus the contract is void.
In conclusion: everything is about reciprocity. When you take other people’s content and don’t provide something back to them, don’t expect to be welcome.
Comment by Cd-MaN — 10th August, 2007 #
I have to say I’m partly convinced by your argument: your scraping is basically the same (besides the images bit) to what search engines do. The difference is that your pages are not always relevant, as the guy above said. I think you wouldn’t get a hard time if your results were relevant though. Kind of like making a tgp where the links go to people you’re trading traffic/selling traffic to.
Comment by Convinced SEO — 7th September, 2007 #