I have heard that they (Craigslist) do not encourage third party sites doing mashups (or enhancing the default search facility).
See http://www.codinghorror.com/craigslist/
They may block your site if they find out you violate their policies.
See http://www.codinghorror.com/craigslist/
They may block your site if they find out you violate their policies.
But Jeff pissed them off by going against a core value -- staying local. On the flip side, sites like housingmaps.com & craiglook.com have been up for many years.
...you agree not to:...
u) use automated means, including spiders, robots, crawlers, data mining tools, or the like to download data from the Service - unless expressly permitted by craigslist;
I chose to talk to him even though we could get the data without them knowing.
How can Craigslist grow?
They have all the data and destination site that has insane traffic. In order to really be everywhere they're going to have to open up to developers to allow their content to spread all over the web. It's what Google has been doing for years and it's what Facebook is trying to do now.
I really hope Craigslist start championing efforts like Flippity. Awesome work guys!