Yet Another New Classified Ads Search Engine: Vast.com Launches

[mandy]

Another new classifieds search enginelaunches:

Vast, which launches Tuesday, is a search engine and Web crawler designed to more easily find classified ads, which sometimes can be difficult to locate with larger engines like Google or Yahoo.

The company, which went by the name Omni-Explorer when it was in stealth mode, will initially focus on three areas: autos, personals and jobs. But more topics like housing, motorcycles and pets will be added as the year goes on, said founder Naval Ravikant.

"Think of it as multiple, vertical classified search across the Web," he said.

full article: http://news.com.com/2100-1024_3-6049161.html

Vast.com is the latest entrant into the online classified ads space. It's interesting to see how all these sites are taking slightly different approaches, from Google Base, to Edgeio to Oodle and now Vast. Meanwhile, Craigslist keeps chugging along with its years-old business model and legacy technology. But we digress.

Vast is super web crawler site. It scours the web looking for structured or unstructured classified info. "It's more akin to how Google used to work, which is you leave your data where it is, and we'll find it,'' said founder Naval Ravikant. "And what we do which is hard is extract the structure out of unstructured data and make it searchable.''

Unlike some listings aggregators and crawlers, which rely on a relatively small set of high-value sites for their data, Vast crawls as much of the web as possible...

full article: http://www.siliconbeat.com/entries/2006/...ks_so.html

The Vast web site: http://www.vast.com

related topics:
Value in an Inventory of One: Oodle and the Growth of Online Classifieds
http://community.tuliptools.com/index.ph...992.0.html
Hot on the Heels of Edgeio...Blog Classifieds Site BlogBuy Makes Its Debut
http://community.tuliptools.com/index.ph...870.0.html
Edgeio: Web 2.0 Classifieds Search Aggregator Readies for Debut
http://community.tuliptools.com/index.ph...780.0.html

[valleygirl]

Unlike some listings aggregators and crawlers, which rely on a relatively small set of high-value sites for their data, Vast crawls as much of the web as possible...

I'm interpreting that as the results will contain lots of crap to sift through.