Craiglook is no longer Craiglook, and it gets better.

[Seth=L]

Craiglook.com is now Claz.org (classifieds search). Is this a new and improved site? The answer is....NO!

Claz.org does not allow RSS feeds from Craiglist hence you are not able to search abroad unless you want to do it one city at a time on craigslist.org. This is a momentousness disappointment to me because this is how I have gained the majority of the Teac Reference components that I know have.

Apparently at the behest of Craigslist (owned by Craig Newark and eBay) they have demanded that Craiglook.com cease to feed from Craigslist.org. My best guess as to why they've made these demands is to reduce con artist activity on Craigslist, or perhaps just because the name "Craig" was in the name.

Honestly, it's probably just a ploy for Craiglist.org to make more money by having Craiglook pay royalties for feeding their classifieds.

 

[Seth=L]

Also, as sad as it is to say this. If you find alternatives, attempt to discuss them as little as possible and do so in private discussion. Chances are that Craigslist intends to crack down on all of them, so the less everyone knows, the less they know.

If anyone has questions for me, you can send a PM.

Thank you!

 

[craig.luc.1975]

No,no,no, it's not about money >8-F

Seth,
No matter how stupid this sounds, but it's not the money they're after. They demanded to shut down the site, no conditions, pointed out that it's stealing trademark and all.. I am eager to work with them on any resolution (change site's name? OK) for legal issues.

They haven't pointed out any technical issues, other than vague "puts unfair load on craigslist servers" which I can put to rest having the chance to talk to someone with technical brains, explaining the tremendous job that Craiglook did for craigslist by feeding on cached content (feeds) which cost them nothing to start with. It used it's own processing power to index search content and stored only(!) links and titles of craigslist content, giving it all back to users.
This is the same job google does, craiglook just does it way better, it doesn't crawl all pages, it only reads a tiny portion, "latest updates".

Stay tuned for the updates, feel free to go to claz org site and leave feedback. Sign up for news on this by sending an email to claz.org@gmail.com

Craiglook.com is now Claz.org (classifieds search). Is this a new and improved site? The answer is....NO!

Claz.org does not allow RSS feeds from Craiglist hence you are not able to search abroad unless you want to do it one city at a time on craigslist.org. This is a momentousness disappointment to me because this is how I have gained the majority of the Teac Reference components that I know have.

Apparently at the behest of Craigslist (owned by Craig Newark and eBay) they have demanded that Craiglook.com cease to feed from Craigslist.org. My best guess as to why they've made these demands is to reduce con artist activity on Craigslist, or perhaps just because the name "Craig" was in the name.

Honestly, it's probably just a ploy for Craiglist.org to make more money by having Craiglook pay royalties for feeding their classifieds.

 

[j.dangle]

by feeding on cached content (feeds) which cost them nothing to start with. It used it's own processing power to index search content and stored only(!) links and titles of craigslist content, giving it all back to users.

How is that even possible ?

I've used craigslist RSS feeds before and they don't include images. Craiglook had image thumbnails, which as far as I know you can only get by visiting every individual item page.

Also, even with pure RSS feeds, wouldn't you be pulling an enormous amount of data considering you'd have to pull dozens of categories for every city, with hundreds of cities, every few minutes ? Would that not equate to hundreds of thousands of users hitting their servers every day ?

 

[Seth=L]

I had noticed that Craiglook only hits titles for search parameters, which I think is excellent considering all those morons out in California copy and paste every electronics manufacturer they can think of and put it in their classified because they think that will somehow increase their chances of selling what they have. In fact, it just annoys the hell out of me when I'm looking for something specific.

 

[j.dangle]

I had noticed that Craiglook only hits titles for search parameters, which I think is excellent considering all those morons out in California copy and paste every electronics manufacturer they can think of and put it in their classified because they think that will somehow increase their chances of selling what they have. In fact, it just annoys the hell out of me when I'm looking for something specific.

Agreed, though what the site searched and what it actually pulled from Craigslist are not related.

I'd love to hear how the author managed to get images without hitting individual pages, and what he meant by hitting cached feeds. Cached by whom ? Google ? Yahoo ? Those sites don't cache everything on Craigslist, which means the data would have been incomplete and somewhat outdated.

As far as I know, the only way to get consistent data is to go directly to Craigslist, RSS or otherwise. But that would defeat his "costs nothing to Craigslist" argument, from what I can tell.