3TAPS, INC.'S ANSWER AND COUNTERCLAIM Case No. CV-12 ...

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272848. 3taps, craigslist, and other general onboarding websites—such as Backpage andeBay Classifieds—are the only companies that engage in the indexing of onboarded classified adcontent across all categories (e.g., the submarkets for apartment rentals, job listings, sales of goods,personal ads, etc.). craigslist and other onboarding websites index their own respective onboardedclassified ad content for use in their search tools offered to users, whereas 3taps indexes the rawclassified ad content that has been onboarded onto craigslist and other third parties’ websites,which in turn 3taps offers to third-party search engine developers.49. Within the product market for the indexing of online classified ad content,competitors can use several methods to index data. For example, both scraping and applicationprogramming interfaces (“APIs”) can be used to index raw onboarded online classified ad content.50. “Scraping” is a process by which a computer analyzes a webpage on a consistentbasis (perhaps daily) to monitor and analyze the contents of the page. For example, in the travelsector, ITA searches for and scrapes travel data from some airlines’ webpages for use by thirdpartytravel search sites. Scraping is a slower and less efficient means of obtaining raw data for usein indexing than an API, but companies can still compete effectively in the indexing market byscraping. Notably, 3taps does not use scraping to collect raw data from craigslist to create itsindexing product.51. Alternatively, companies that have access to raw data have the option to use an APIto offer third parties access to their indexes in order to search their data or to receive a stream ofraw data so that third parties can create their own indexes of data (“third-party indexes”). craigslisthas chosen not to provide an API or any form of its index to third parties for search, nor does itprovide raw data that would enable third parties to build their own indexes. Instead, craigslistparticipates in the indexing market only to facilitate its own search engine and tools.52. craigslist does offer limited RSS feeds of its content, but these feeds cannot be usedto create an efficient and useful index. The RSS feeds are updated only every fifteen minutes andare limited to the last one hundred postings. Therefore, if more than one hundred postings areonboarded during a fifteen minute period, those posts do not appear in the RSS feeds. In practice,as much as seventy percent of data is lost. Thus, developers cannot create useful indexes that3TAPS’ ANSWER AND COUNTERCLAIM37CASE NO.: 12-CV-3816-CRB