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Questions on deep-linking

Bharat Kumar

CHENNAI, May 28

TRY recalling your last visit to a household appliances exhibition-cum sale. There, you probably saw a hundred others, who like you, comprised the target market for all those vast hoardings, sale announcements blaring from loudspeakers, and each stall ve ndor flaunting his ware. At the entry point, you probably got a brochure that gave a general idea of what is available at the venue.

Now, what if someone sends 500 representatives to make a detailed report of each product from each stall so that you have all the information before hand?

One, you would probably spend less time at the stalls, since you know where you need to go. Which means you also get to escape those advertisement campaigns inside the exhibition. Two, 500 extra people, who are not the target audience for the ad campaign s, put a tremendous strain on the venue's resources, especially if it can cater adequately to 300 at a time. Clearly, the exhibition authorities would have none of this.

Interestingly, the cyberworld has not reacted differently. A similar attempt on the Internet has been ruled against by a US court. This could have implications for those who aggregate content on the Web.

According to information available at www.internetworldnews.com, ``eBay won a preliminary injunction on Wednesday to stop Bidder's Edge from using a Web crawler to search eBay's site for publicly available auction information.''

Such an exercise takes up between 1.1 per cent and 1.5 per cent of the total load on eBay's servers, the site said.

In contrast, another ruling that happened late March this year went in favour of deep-linking from one site to another without fear of violating copyright. Meaning, a site may freely link its visitor to a Web page devoted to say, beetles within another s ite dedicated to insects. (See Business Line issue dated April 5, 2000).

Combined, these rulings give rise to questions that become relevant in the Indian environment -- where the rules of the new economy are still to be established, despite the IT Bill being set to become law.

One, the earlier of the two US rulings indicates that the owner of site A cannot prevent site B from directing a surfer to site A, so long as the content is not copied and the surfer clearly knows he is moving from one site to another. But the more recen t ruling implies that the Web site owner truly owns property on the Web and that he can control access to the site. Where does one draw the line?

Two, should one differentiate between Web robots visiting your site to cull information and individual visitors being linked from other sites? Clearly, the latter will give your advertisers better value for money.

Three, is there a need for a set of clear guidelines on the right to obstruct traffic to one's own Web site? For instance, assume no Web robots cull information from site A and that it discovers that a chunk of visitors come through directions from site B. If their demographic profiles do not give its advertisers value for money, can site A claim that site B's directions to it place a strain on site A's Web resources? While this would clearly make for a more targeted audience, ethical questions arise he re.

Finally, who decides when an extra ``load'' on a particular server from another specific server exceeds a ``limit''? And how does one set the limit?

How do Web crawlers work?

WEB crawlers are automated programmes that help in indexing Web sites according to a given category. For instance, if you want to index pages -- available on the Web -- relating to say, ``cricket'', then you could initiate a ``spider'' -- or Web crawler -- to navigate the Web, and collate information on a given category. This makes it easy for users searching for data to narrow in on what they want, very quickly. However, spiders, especially if not well written, can increase load on a particular server.

For a detailed note on Web crawlers, check out www.zdnet.com/pcmag/issues/1513/pcmg0045.htm.