FROOGLE Adding Auction Listings

How far behind will Ebay be?

[4crests]

"BUY NOW" auctionbytes are being added to FROOGLE.

[auctionbytes.com...]

I wonder how long until all Ebay "Buy Now" items are listed in Froogle? It will definitely be interesting.

eBay items have not previously been picked up by Froogle because items are in a dynamic database, and Prices, Bids, etc. change on a continual basis. However, with the "Buy Now" items it is possible. Also, Ebay has the EBAY STORES section.

[lazerzubb]

I wonder what will happen with Froogle, it's like it wants to be something like epinions (which i think is fantastic).

[4crests]

yeah, it's kind of exciting watching it grow.

[sun818]

Although some of the smaller auction sites will appreciate the extra traffic, I doubt eBay would benefit from sending a feed. eBay is already a "destination" and they send traffic via pay-per-click engines. If you look at the item number, they are never crawled by GoogleBot. Part of it is for performance reasons, but the other I'm sure, is to protect traffic leaks. eBay has a history of suing or settling out of court with companies that crawl the item numbers without permission. For example, AuctionWatch.com settled and agreed to remove eBay listings from their search engine.

If eBay Stores owner push for inclusion, eBay may do it. And it would be to give the perception that paying $10 a month for an eBay Store will be a succesful investment.

[wasmith]

IMHO ebay cut off that hand (robots looking at what it offers) when they took that other site to court that was spidering ebays listing, biddersedge.com or something like that.

[Ankheg]

It's worth noting that some (but not all) eBay "about me" pages are indexed by Google... but they're semistatic. I think what's always prevented their being indexed is the abundance of variables in their URL's (ebay.com?blahblah;x=whatever;item-number=something;lang=en...), which Google doesn't like.

It'll be interesting to see what Froogle does. AFAIK, eBay's "buy it now" fixed price listings still have normal item numbers, and the long, multivariable URL's that Google chokes on...

[sun818]

This is eBay's robots.txt:

#
# The use of robots or other automated means to access the eBay site
# without the express permission of eBay is strictly prohibited.
# Notwithstanding the foregoing, eBay may permit automated access to
# access certain eBay pages but soley for the limited purpose of
# including content in publicly available search engines. Any other
# use of robots or failure to obey the robots exclusion standards set
# forth at <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html> is strictly
# prohibited.
#

User-agent: *
Disallow: /buy
Disallow: /community
Disallow: /help
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /sell
Disallow: /ebaymotors/browse
Disallow: /ebaymotors/help
Disallow: /ebaymotors/search

#
#

Just following some initial links, GoogleBot does crawl some of the high level links. But item detailed ones are not crawled. My feeling is that because eBay has such a high PageRank, GoogleBot would crawl the entire site if allowed.

But if you check out cgi.ebay.com/robots.txt this is what is says:

# go away
User-agent: *
Disallow: /