There’s always something to howl about.

Trulia – A search engine?

Quote from Rudy Bachraty on REBarCamp Denver’s announcement that he will be speaking there: (my emphasis added)

“Trulia is a real estate search engine and online community where you can find homes for sale and detailed local real estate information.”

This is the second time in recent days that I have seen Trulia refer to itself as a search engine. In my opinion that is no accident. So time for me to offer some clarity.

Ummm…OK…calling yourself a search engine is a nice little attempt to muddy the water in our little blissfully ignorant vertical and blur the differences between a scraper (which your site started as–more references available upon request), a third party listing aggregator, and a search engine. There are huge differences between them. Google is not a scraper. They are a search engine. They index data that resides on other peoples servers. You, on the other hand, pull the listing data onto your own site for the purposes of monetizing it.

Let’s see, how can I explain this the easiest way…perhaps a video:

You see, Trulia? I know search engines.

Search engines are a friend of mine…

and Trulia?…

You’re no search engine.