GoogleBase, Craigslist, Oodle, Oh My

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(Ongoing Thinking Out Loud based on the conversation spawned by this post) So my question for Craigslist is this: Once Yahoo or Google decide to do a vertical listings engine - and they will, at some point or in some fashion - will Craigslist bar them as well? If the answer is a consistent yes, then we understand what Craigslist's strategy is. In essence: a walled garden. They are building a self contained community that does not want to be part of the search economy. That's fine, though I could argue at length it's not a very wise strategy, but they have to right to pursue it. However, right now, Craigslist is on the fence. Vertical aggregators like Indeed are OK, and extremely generalized engines like Google are OK. This raises an interesting question with regard to GoogleBase: Will Oodle - or anyone else - be able to crawl its contents? My guess is no. While Google is extremely aggressive about its right to crawl anything it can, it will most likely act like an owner when it comes to content - and metadata - it hosts on GoogleBase. I spoke with Oodle's founders today, right before the GoogleBase story broke, to get an update about the ongoing Craigslist/Oodle story. Oodle founder Craig Donato was genuinely puzzled as to why Craigslist has asked Oodle to stop - and despite the comments in the last thread, which claim Oodle is a parasite, I see his puzzlement. Why stop Oodle, but not Indeed, or other aggregators? Is it because Oodle indexes all of Craigslist? Perhaps, but where's the harm?When you look at Oodle's model, it's all about pushing traffic back to Craigslist, in fact, the only way you can execute on the content you've found via Oodle is to go to...

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