Buy Search Indexes Off The Shelf From 80legs

The startup 80legs launched in September of last year to make web crawling affordable and accessible to anyone that wanted to subscribe to the service. The company makes crawling the web or customized slices of it available to even small companies. More flexible than something like the Google Custom Search Engine, pricing ranges from free to $300 per month for users or companies with “heavy crawling needs.”

After watching how its customers were using the service the company has now come out what it calls “Crawl Packages,” pre-configured crawls of various sorts. Think of them as “vertical” or niche indexes. These include social networks and shopping sites:

Here’s the early list of these pre-configured crawls:

• Social networks
• Retail and shopping websites
• Real estate websites
• Blogs and news publications
• Business directories

The data being crawled are only those that are publicly available, CEO Shion Deysarkar explained. He said that many of 80legs’ clients were doing interesting analysis or building functionality on top of the crawls being generated by 80legs.

There are a wide range of applications for the service, including for consumer-facing sites and B2B services, such as social media monitoring. Deysarkar also gave the example of product sites being crawled to monitor pricing data. Another example: a startup that sought to add rental or for-sale property listings could use 80legs to collect that information from the top-10 real estate sites.

One could crawl and analyze all the public Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, and so on. The service offers a cost-effective way to build an index or monitor certain types of content or activity online.