> client side scraping of the data actually increases the traffic on CL's servers
Of course, but not in PadMapper's case.
"Padmapper gets its data from 3Taps, a site that collects and republishes Craigslist's content. 3Taps, in turn, says it gets its data from cached copies supplied by Google and Bing, rather than Craigslist directly."
I'm sorry, but you should really ask yourself if this is true. Bing maybe, as they can do what ddg does and pull a feed from Yahoo/Bing BOSS (maybe?) but to scrape Google would be a very bad and unreliable (and counter to the Google TOS) way of getting this information.
Padmapper used to scrape Craigslist, but stopped after a cease and desist letter. While buying the data from a service that scrapes search engine caches may be unreliable, my understanding is that it's legally much more defensible.
They used to do that. They were told to stop. They stopped. They found a new way that didn't affect CL bandwidth. So what they started off doing is not all that relevant to what they are doing now. However, what this Chrome Extension is doing is pretty much what PadMapper was doing... so it would follow that this Chrome Extension will get smacked. Or worse... the extension users each get smacked.
Of course, but not in PadMapper's case.
"Padmapper gets its data from 3Taps, a site that collects and republishes Craigslist's content. 3Taps, in turn, says it gets its data from cached copies supplied by Google and Bing, rather than Craigslist directly."
Source: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/craigslist-tighte...