| Websites that "steal" content databases |
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visual
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| Websites that "steal" content databases |
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I was wondering what you guys think about large websites that copy the content from other places, probably in an automatated fashion.
I will give an example. Wikipedia is a Free encyclopedia that gives legal permission to copy it's articles.
Here's one of it's articles: List of authors of erotic works
And here are a bunch of sites that have copied this article, along with apparently every single other wikipedia article:
Answers.com
Biology Daily - The Biology Encyclopedia
Absolute Astronomy Reference
These "copy cat" sites are all apparently making money off of advertising.
I imagine that a programmer could in only a few hours make an "encylopedia website" that contains only all of the wikipedia content. Such a website would have potential for some massive traffic(and ad revenue) since it would have a huge wealth of knowledge/content. Of course realizing this potential would be the tricky part since all of the content would be unoriginal.
Going for search engine rankings would probably not be a good idea, since it would be difficult to get people to link to your site's articles - most webmasters would obviously notice that your article is a copy of wikipedia's and they would link to wikipedia's original article. Also, no matter how much search engine optimization you perform on your site, you are going to have a really hard chance over-ranking wikipedia itself, and so the original wikipedia article result will be above your site's copy of the article in the search results.
But surely there are other ways that one could use to bring in traffic, purchasing ads, word of mouth and other clever ideas.
I was just wondering what you guys think of this, from a business perspective, and also maybe the ethics of such practices.
Thanks!
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Wed Oct 12, 2005 4:31 pm |
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Andrew
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Speaking about website that steal content, Answers.com is a golden treasure compared to the bulk of these kinds: scraper sites.
Scraper sites are automated, and usually grab the search results from Google (unauthorized use) for a set of themed keywords. These sites suck, because they really have no practical use at all, and are only done to slap some ads on to make a quick buck.
I think Answers.com has done it well from a business point of view, and from a useability point of view. They've integrated some great tools in one spot, Wikipedia, dictionary, etc. I like it!
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Wed Oct 12, 2005 5:44 pm |
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darqfighter
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Putting wikipedia's content on your own site is not illegal per se as long as you include the GNU license with it.
So, technical it isn't really stealing. And yes, it can be done easily using an automated software.
Perhaps these are sites that are just looking for quick easy bucks. Personally, I believe that for your site to be on the net for a long long time to come, originality is of vital importance.
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Tue Nov 22, 2005 6:53 am |
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