Where Real Estate Gets Its Dirt

Datafiniti receives cease and desist from Zillow to stop scraping their data.

Zillow orders data company to stop scraping its content

“Zillow sent a cease-and-desist letter this week to a data startup that, the letter argues, was improperly “harvesting” data from the online real estate giant.
The letter went out Monday to a company called Datafiniti. The Texas-based company offers “instant access to every data point on the web,” and claims to have data sets that include millions of people, products and businesses.”

Yowza! It appears that Zillow isn’t Datafiniti’s only target. Inman was able to find photos from Redfin, CRMLS, and CPAR (Central Panhandle). I did some poking around too and found photos from Trulia as well. So what did Datafiniti say when they were questioned about this?

Shion Deysarkar

“In a phone conversation Tuesday, Datafiniti founder and CEO Shion Deysarkar characterized the situation as a misunderstanding. He said that his company is crawling the web the way Google does as it compiles and creates search results.

“Instead of consumer search we’re providing more structured search,” Deysarkar said.”

A “more structured search” ????

Tell it to the judge, Shion. Tell it to the judge.

Hats off to Eric Stegemann of Tribus for connecting the dots on this story.

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