Craiglist drops search tool
p2pnet.net News:- We had an email from a reader leading to a techdirt story which points out that Craigslist has shut down a tool that let users to search all US Craigslist cities for job postings and sale/wanted ads.
The pic on the right shows only the US and Canada but in fact, Craiglist extends into Europe and well beyond.
“I used the tool a lot and I am REALLY sad to see it gone,” says abhabaha in a forums thread.
“The search tool in question was built by an independent person, not as part of Craigslist itself,” techdirt says, going on:
“Graigslist certainly has the right not to allow it (and the letter they sent was friendly, rather than the typical corporate cease & desist letter you expect these days). However, it still seems a bit odd, and goes against the basic spirit that most people associate with Craigslist. It might be understandable if they claimed that the search was causing bandwidth problems or an accidental denial of service attack, or something along those lines. Instead, the letter claims they asked the guy to take it down because it: ‘goes against the basic intent of Craigslist to be a local tool.’ That’s a very odd statement. While Craigslist is a local tool (and a very useful one, at that), local can mean different things to different people – especially on this great big internet. The tool certainly sounds like it would be useful to those trying to search for jobs in multiple places, without doing much harm, so it’s too bad to see Craigslist apparently react this way. There could be more to this story (at least, I hope there really is more to this story), but if not, it seems like a bad move on the part of Craigslist.”
‘Unintentional denial of service’
Was there indeed more to it? – p2pnet asked list owner Craig Newmark
“It’s my understanding that we’ve only blocked those tools which were hitting our site so hard they interfered with performance,” he answered. “That is, in such cases these tools commit an unintentional denial of service attack. The tool builders in such cases just wouldn’t work with us.”
And, “Third party sites that attempt to provide search across all cities fall outside our terms of use, disproportionately impact our servers, undermine the local quality of craigslist, and subject craigslist posters to unwelcome non-local inquiries that they have not opted into,” Craiglist’s Jim Buckmaster told us.
“It is no accident that we have not enabled searches across all cities. Similarly, we don’t allow the same listing to be posted across all cities. There are plenty of national/nonlocal sites out there. We don’t aspire to become one of them, nor do the large majority of Craigslist users want us to downgrade our local nature.”
(Thanks, Marsha)
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