Legality of search bots

From: Boey Taik Boon <tbb_at_post1.com>
Date: Fri 26 May 2000 01:06:40 -0700

Is a search bot utility legal?

I work for an American PC company's Asian operations.
Recently, a startup software company approached us
with a proposal to bundle a search bot with all our
PCs shipped in this region.

This search bot is a utility that resides in the PC and
does a composite search using the search results of
other established search engines. However this utility
only displays the results and links but does not grab
and display the advertisement banner that would have
appeared on the page of the search engine itself. That
would deprive the advertiser who paid for the banner
his due impression - am I correct? Since the server of
the search engine would have registered one serving of
the banner to the search utility but the search
utility itself does not display that banner.

Can anyone advise if such a search utility is legal.
Has anyone been sued before for making use of the
search results from search engines.

Thank you and regards
Boey Taik Boon




Received on Fri May 26 2000 - 03:06:40 CDT