I was reading a post on Matt Mullenweg’s blog (PhotoMatt), titled “DoubleClick and Kevin Ryan” which talks about Google having bought double click, and Kevin Ryan (co-founder) has moved on to a new start up called ShopWiki. (I am not going to link to them though).
Basically ShopWiki sends bots out to trawl the web and find products at the best price for you. You may think this is a wonderful thing, and it may well be. I am somewhat intrigued though as to why this site (notable for its abject lack of sellable items) has been getting hammered by the Shop Wiki bot for most of the last two days (until it got the .htaccess treatment). As far as I can see, the bot ignored the Robots.txt entry I put in for it (although my track record with this file is poor).
I think the idea behind ShopWiki seems sound and I am sure it is a wonderful new idea. But I have to question the validity of the data it has collected, given the time and effort it spent looking round the contact pages here. In a spambot like fashion, the ShopWiki bot seems to have concentrated on pages which made reference to emails and the like.
Time may modify my point of view, but for now I think of this as a Bad Shop.
You forgot most of the solar system, of course.
Very true. Maybe that is why we have been ShopWiki’d to death now 🙂
I cant wait for people to buy some of Pluto from us.
We also need to branch out so it includes the rest of the cosmos. At least we wont run out of real estate…
I’ll sell you some interstellar space at a bargain rate of £9.99 per cubic lightyear. Comes with planning permission and an abundance of free cosmic background radiation. While stocks last.
P.S. Doubleclick sucks, but not as much as Intellitxt does.
I need to update this, a few weeks ago (I dont check my comments email account often enough) I had a message from the ShopWiki people clearing a lot of this up. I have replied to them, and depending on the outcome of that I will repost my possibly changed opinions.
Hey TW…It’s Carlos from ShopWiki. Thanks for posting up the note, but I never got your reply to my message. Shoot me an email with “Bad Shop” in the subject line and we’ll settle any other questions you had. Thanks!