MSN Classifieds

It looks like MSN will soon release a free classifieds service with some social twists. This idea has a lot of promise.  Classifieds are most definitely a social phenomenon in that they typically result in an offline, face-to-face interaction with another human.  Also, sometimes consumers want to trade in smaller communities where they know or have some sort of connection with other people (e.g., on college campuses, on company bulletin boards).

I'm not surprised that it's free.  As I've mentioned in previous posts, the market price for a basic classified listings has already been established as free.  Any consumer can post a free listing in Craigslist and now a growing list of sites including GoogleBase, Backpage, Geebo, LiveDeal, etc.  They can also post in on their website or in their blog and pay Google, Yahoo to advertise it.   

I'm most interested to see what kind of biz model they employ or at least what model they hint at in this initial release.  I'm also excited about adding another quality source to our index ;)

Comments

[Janne]

You better ask before you scrape this time.

[Craig Donato]

we always check robots.txt...

i've posted on this before so i'll be brief in my response. it's not reasonable to expect a search engine to contact every site in its index. there would be no billion page indexes if this was the case. that's why the robots.txt protocol exists. it acts as a simple invitation (or gate) to search engines.

[Luke]

True about the robot.txt, however, scrapers are not search engines and they do not always listen to robot.txt files.

[Craig Donato]

Luke,

Fair enough. I think there is a big difference between scrapers (that grab and display content) and search engines that point to it.

To be clear and more directly respond to Janne's comment, Oodle is a search engine not a scraper. Our goal is to deliver users to the right classified listing wherever it may reside.