I was surfing Google blog search today seeing if there was anything new related to real estate. I ran across a blog post about Google and Trulia joining forces for Google to supply real estate listings. I wont go in to a long story about it. So after reading about this joint venture I decided I was going to check my server logs for one of our company sites. I noticed a stranger link from an external page coming in to the site: tools.trulia.com/outworx/complete_site_db.php After seeing this and the url it got me to wondering whether Trulia is scraping sites that have this raw data feed from their MLS. Before I go on any further how do some of you programmers see this URL? If this is what I think it is then it will shed a whole new light on this Google and Trulia partnership. Just a quick update we have not setup a feed with Trulia for our MLS data.
Well the URL give me: Going to the www I get a slick site created by a bunch of experienced people with Stanford MBA's. They look like they positioned themselves to be acquired by Google (used Google maps and have a clean Google look). You can bet they are using Google Sitemaps and Google Base to get all their data in Googles searches. Look at the About Us and API sections and you will see how they get data.
My first thought was since we have not registered on that site and we do receive the raw data feed from our MLS is that they are gaining acess to that data through our site for the city we are in. Am I wrong? ADD: In order to receive the raw data feeds for the MLS you must be a real estate broker. This is the case for most States and Cities throughout the US.
I don't think a startup like that would be scrapping data off of your site or others. I would guess they have access to MLS and your data is shared there. Is your data available through MLS or other public sources?