Oodle calls Craigslist Cesspool of Crime. Looks like it's on between oddle and craigslist.

 

Oodle calls Craigslist Cesspool of Crime

February 27th, 2011
By Kris Ashton

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A recent independent and possibly not completely unbiased study shows that Craigslist can be harmful to your health. Oodle, a rival classified ads site hired the AIM Group, a research firm for the industry, to go over reports about Craigslist and pinpoint when the site was connected to criminal activity in the press.

This past week Oodle released those finding, calling Craigslist “a cesspool of crime”. The study showed that Craigslist was linked to 330 crimes that included 12 murders and 105 robberies or assaults over a one year period.

Many around the net criticized Oodle for its seemingly underhanded tactics but Craig Donato, CEO of Oodle defended his company’s actions saying the findings were not meant to be scientific but just a look at the news reports covering Craigslist’s connection to crime.

Craigslist countered the report on their blog when Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist, said that the classified listings scraper/aggregator and CL wannabe Oodle has paid AIM Group to falsely portray craigslist as fraught with criminal activity.

The post went on to say that Craigslist had 550 times the amount of page views and 1000 the number of listings that Oodle had and that if Oodle had just one crime connected with it in a 12 month period, Oodle’s crime rate would exceed that of Craigslist by almost two times.

Donato said they had debated on releasing the report but decided that it was the right thing to do, informing the public about the safety issues.

But wait, there’s a back story here and a possible motive for revenge by Oodle. As stated by Buckmaster, Oodle is a classified ad scraper or aggregator, collecting listings from a number of other sites and displaying them in one central location. In 2005 Craigslist sent Oodle a cease-and-desist notice, demanding that they stop scraping Craiglist ads.

In an interview with Tom Foremski from Silicon Valley Watcher.com Buckmaster said that Oodle’s aggressive scraping was putting a strain on their infrastructure and causing problems for users of the site while the benefits from such sites as Oodle amounted to about 0.5 percent and slowed down performance.

Last fall Craigslist shut down its adult-services sections after pressure from law enforcement officials and anti-sex-trafficking groups complaining that the ads promoted prostitution and sex slavery involving underage girls.

The AIM Group counted 70,973 listings for prostitutes on Craigslist last August alone and reported that the site gave up $3.7 million a month in prostitution advertising when it shut down those sections.

A number of murders have been linked to CraigsList ads where killers have lured their victims through Craigslist. Some of these have been considered to be loose connections at best though. While many of the numbers given by the research group may be true, it’s also obvious that Oodle had less than altruistic intentions in mind when they paid AIM to do the research.

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