Re: Political economy of distributed search (was topical

Brian Ulicny (ulicny@limbex.com)
Mon, 6 May 96 19:18:55 -0700 (PDT)

At 02:19 AM 5/3/96 -0700, Erik Selberg wrote:

>Another fact service
>providers are going to have to face is that they can't just block
>these integrators. Most of these integrators are currently central
>services; MetaCrawler and BargainFinder fall into that
>category. However, client-side integrators are becoming more popular
>--- WebCompass for example. It's impossible to block, because there's
>no way for a service to determine a normal user query from a
>WebCompass query (unless the WebCompass folks choose to do so, eh
>Brian?)

I should point out that we at Limbex are good Web citizens and do identify
our agent as the WebCompass Agent in the user-agent field. So far, I
suppose, the search services would rather have the increased hit-count with
ad pull through than block our Agent out.

Also, I should point out that the Web search engines that WebCompass uses
are configurable by the user which is convenient for search sites that are
updated daily, such as the NYTimes search engine.

Best,

Brian Ulicny

Limbex Corporation V/mail: (310) 309-4281 x4505
13160 Mindanao Way, Suite 234 Fax: (310) 309 4282
Marina Del Rey, CA 90292 USA URL: http://www.limbex.com/