Commercial Use Questions

[Jackson]

BACKGROUND: We're involved in a project that takes search engine results and extracts entities from the results. This could include things like people, places and companies. As an example, if you did a search on "Search Engines" a list of people or companies associated with "Search Engines" would be provided and ranked (ranking could be as simple as number of occurrences or a more complicated relevancy score). You could then click on the entity to see a list of search results that include both the entity and "Search Engines." We eventually plan to charge for this service.

Given that we are planning a commercial product on top of a search engine(s) what kind of formal agreements, if any, do we need to get from the search engine companies? I imagine Google, Yahoo, etc have some fine print about this. Is it easier to work with some search companies than others? Ideally we'd be aggregating searches from a number of search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, etc).

Thanks for any replies

[rustybrick]

Google has an API which it allows you to use for free for non-commercial reasons only, you can get special permission to use it commercially but it is hard.

Yahoo, I think, also has an API, but you have to pay for it. It is pretty expensive but it can be used for commercial reasons.

Non of the engines allow automated querying of their search engines, so the only proper way to do this is to use the API's provided.

[strategicrankings]

I'm actually working on a rather similar project as Jackson, whom i thank for asking this question.

So according to rusty, its hard to get permission to use the API for commercial use. My question is, if i propose a limited version of the tool (still under development) to be used freely on my site, do i run the risk of getting problems? The same tool will be used offsite for competition analysis, so it is not being "sold" as such on the site.

Thanks for your replies.
Riley

[rustybrick]

As long as its free, Google should let you go along with it. But in the TOS of the API, they can do whatever they want. They have no obligation to let anyone use the API, so your at their mercy (which is ok).

[strategicrankings]

Does that mean that guys like marketleap are also at the mercy of google, for their linkpopularity tool? I guess they are using the API too.

[rustybrick]

I do not know if marketleap is using the API, I think their tool was available before the API came out, but I can not talk for marketleap.

If they are using the API, then yes, they are at the mercy of Google.

I know the tools I have built that use the API is at the mercy of Google. Not that it worries me. :)

[strategicrankings]

Thanks Rusty. I'll try to sleep without any worry about it. :)