This morning brings another cautionary tale for anyone trying to build a Website or a business using data from another site. Visual search engine ManagedQ is broken right now because it took images of Websites from another visual search engine, Snap, without permission. (See screenshot above). Sound familiar? Alexaholic (now Statsaholic) ran into similar trouble with Amazon a year ago for taking graphs from Alexa before they were officially available through its API (read more about that dispute here). It is unfortunate that Snap effectively disabled ManagedQ, which is run by a few programmers out of a basement in Palo Alto. But it goes to show that just because data is becoming more freely available on the Web, you still have to be careful about building a business on another company’s data. It appears that ManagedQ based its visual previews entirely on Snap’s images. As I wrote in a review last month: Every time you do a search on ManagedQ, a grid appears on the right of the first six results so you can visually see what is on the other side of what is normally a blue link. If you click on one of the images, it opens up a larger, browsable window still within ManagedQ. The idea is that you can surf the Web without leaving the search application. The way ManagedQ was using the images violated Snap’s terms of service (TOS), according to Snap CEO Tom McGovern. Snap does distribute these images through its Snap Shots widgets. (We use them on TechCrunch. If you mouse over any external link in this post, an image of the Web page on the other end will pop up). After coming across the site, his engineers figured out that ManagedQ was taking the images from Snap without any attribution or link, and cloaking the fact that it had done so. After contacting ManagedQ and not getting a response, McGovern ordered his engineers to block the site’s access to Snap’s images. Warns McGovern: Folks really need to use services per the TOS. Otherwise they will go the way of ManagedQ or Alexaholic. Ouch. At least his engineers didn’t replace the Website snap shots with goatse images. But the reaction does seem a bit harsh, especially for a tiny site like ManagedQ. Was McGovern justified in his response? Here’s what ManagedQ looked like before: Update: ManagedQ founder David Stat has provided the following → Read More
Creating a new search engine seems like a futile exercise. If Yahoo and Microsoft cannot compete with Google in search, what chance does a startup have? So instead of creating new search engines, we are starting to see the rise of search applications that sit on top of existing search engines. Two recent examples are Surf Canyon, which publicly launched its browser add-on today, and ManagedQ, which launched its own site quietly a few weeks ago. I’ve been playing around with both for about a week. They both offer improvements to the pared-down search interface that we are all used to and point to areas where search can be made better. Not bad for two startups without any venture capital (Surf Canyon has raised $250,000 in angel money, and ManagedQ is run out of the founder’s basement in Palo Alto). Still, while both point in the right direction, neither one comes close to offering a better overall search experience than Google does on its own. Surf Canyon is an application that sits on top of regular search results. The startup has its own Website where you can conduct searches, but the browser add-on makes it much more practical to use. The add-on is for either Firefox or Internet Explorer, and essentially allows you to re-order search results on Google, Yahoo, or Windows Live Search. (Google doesn’t like it when other Websites re-order its search rankings, but Surf Canyon doesn’t rely on Google’s APIs to do what it does and thus feels that it is not bound by Google’s restrictions). Whenever you do a search, a little bullseye icon appears at the right of each result. If you click on the bullseye, Surf Canyon inserts three recommended search results that are similar to the one you clicked on. They appear indented under the result you are trying to drill down into. For instance, if you search for “techcrunch,” the three recommended results might be a link to TechCrunch UK, Crunchgear, and the TechCrunch Tech President Primaries (the recommended results change over time, even for the same search). You can drill down two more times within the recommended results to keep on refining your search. So if you click on the bullseye again next to one of the recommended links, you might get a link to TechCrunch on Amazon’s Kindle store from page 8 of the regular Google results, a mention in → Read More
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