Search Engine's opening up free API's for their results

Rand Fishkin makes an excellent post on his blog about why search engines should offer API's for all SEO's to be able to pull search results without scraping. He argues people are doing it anyway and opening complete, accurate APIs could reduce the incidence and search engines should want this because scraping is harming search engines and advertisers through skewing statistics. Although I support this arguement I have a counter arguement of my own which I posted to his blog but also wanted to note down here.

I have often been irritated that scraping is against terms and conditions [...of search engines...] since many people do it anyway. [...Saying they should open up APIs because of...] This is like an old argument in the real world that it is better to make something legal and regulate it than to let it stay illegal and unregulated. There are huge studies on this around prostitution, alcohol, cannabis and other less pleasant parts of life and the conclusions are always mixed.

Certainly exposing this data gives SEO's a head start. It would make it trivial to detect who is the #1 site in a field, ripping apart all the variables in that site (similar but with a bit more depth than your page strength tool) and by running a comparison against the #2 or better #10 site for that field getting significant clues towards improving your rankings. Effectively this kind of back engineering of the algorithm makes the space race hot up between SEO, SEO black hat and the search engines themselves which in many ways isn't a bad thing since it would level the playing field a little more than now within the SEO community.

From the fact there are still major arguments around the real world examples I noted above I personally find it hard to straight up agree with your suggested results [...but...] I certainly do find your arguments compelling from a search engine's point of view.

From a search engine's point of view I personally wouldn't expose search APIs for another reason.

eBay benefit massively from exposing their platform to any developer and publically released data around their dev con stated huge amounts of listings (hence revenue) are driven by the totally free eBay API (with 1.5million calls a day offered to any developer who certifies) so eBay make money by exposing their platform for free. Unlike eBay the search engines don't benefit from allowing people to use their search results platform without visiting it. Imagine Google search bars, boxes, related links that don't link to google and worse use Shopping.com or Y!PN ads to monetize... Think Copernicus and mashing up yahoo + google + ask + msn results to get the best results and then cut them out of the revenue upside.

I think Rand's post was really awesome and his blog is fantastic. If you are into SEO you should definitely read it.

Comments

[retro jordan 13]

Thank you for your opiniones and words, dear brothers!
David: yes, in our Spanish speaking world ABBA BIBLES is the only one that rebinds Bibles with high quality leathers and methods. I asked them to upgrade their website, because there will be a lot of people interested in their services. And for Spanish, well, it's the language of Heaven! Isn't it?
Esteban & Abraham: yes, the RVR60 is the most used and trusted Bible in our Spanish speaking churches. The RVR95 is just the last revision of that one, and only affects some words and the order of poetry, but not the Reina-Valera principles. I also have another Bibles versions rebounded by Abba Bibles, and like Mark said, today just is the beggining of the posts about them. Be patient!

[buy from taobao]

good job guys