Using MSN and Yahoo related searches for a New Search Engine

[monte7]

Good afternoon,

I have been trying to find this information directly from the source of MSN and Yahoo! companies but I keep on getting the same old contact another department etc.

I would like to know if it is legal to pull searches from search engines like MSN and Altavista like dogpile does? Or does a person need permission to do this from the respected sites?

Any information would be great!

Thank you.
monte7

[andrewgoodman]

What you're inquiring about is the legality of metasearch. It's not necessarily legal. Practically speaking you may also be barred from retrieving the query results. Infospace (owner of Dogpile and Metacrawler) became very serious about metasearch back in the day, so they worked hard to form formal agreements with their sources. You can bet that including sponsored links prominently were part of the "horse trading".

Those who try to do this with unauthorized queries don't tend to work very well.

Others (see Ixquick) have simply left Google out of the equation as it's too tough to get them to agree.

There are some discussions of this topic, including on this forum, though they aren't particularly detailed:
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=6822&goto=nextnewest

It helps to understand which of your sources actually produce distinct index query results of their own, and which have updated, fresh indexes. Not many of today's search engines maintain distinct indexes. (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask, dmoz... some sponsored links programs... and then... it kind of drops off... still, that's a lot right there...)

I am nostalgic for the heyday of metasearch. :)

[monte7]

Hi Andrew,

Thank you for the reply. I have contacted a few of the top search engines and of course, no reply. I will continue with this effort.
Do you know of sites that I can legally pull from that includes images and video? I am guessing I can pull from DMOZ for regular searches. I will be creating my own directory but need to start from a place.
I look forward to yoru answer. Thank you :)
David

[Marcia]

can pull from DMOZYou can't just pull their results, you have to do it according to their set procedures.