Earlier today, Job-finding website Jobberman blocked Njorku, an African search engine from accessing and crawling through its content. Like other search engines and services, Njorku’s bots crawl the web in search of relevant jobs related to your search’s keywords.
In a Facebook update, Njorku’s founder said
“Now wondering why http://www.jobberman.com/ will block the http://www.njorku.com/ crawler … could this be a sign of something we do good or bad ?”
“…we are a search engine… not a job site… just a vertical search engine like Google, like indeed, like careerjet, like jobrapido.com.ng (which they allow anyway)… maybe cos we are African and Africans dont like Africans growing.”
In an email to Techloy, Jobberman founder Opeyemi Awoyeni said
“Jobberman.com has graciously provided tools and APIs for third party and partner sites to use our job listings in creative ways. The two approved methods are: Brandable Widget Service (widget.jobberman.com) and RSS Feeds.
We have however seen some sites and lately Njorku.com using other poorly engineered methods to pull jobs from our website. And we have had them blocked.
Why? They alone take more than 60% of our server resources, as a result causing downtimes and more expense in paying for CPU and bandwidth resources. This is because the methods being used to get the jobs from our websites are poorly engineered by the developers of these websites.”
I should normally say ‘Njorku is a search engine like Google and doesn’t deserve to be blocked’ but Njorku has its own ‘Browse Jobs’ page apart from its search feature. Now, this makes Njorku a competitor to Jobberman i.e in creating viewable jobs. It’ll be quite difficult to go through Jobberman and Njorku’s job page to find out which jobs have been pulled, I guess Opeyemi Awoyeni has a point.
Earlier this year, Jobberman was involved in a small controversy. Dealfish had posted a Google ad with the title ‘Jobberman: Find jobs…’. We all called that very unethical. Not the ad but the title. The title was very misleading.
What do you think about Jobberman’s block of Njorku and other job sites? Leave us a comment.
Source: Techloy
