

MixRank (YC S11) Raises $1.5M from Mark Cuban, 500 Startups - il
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/13/display-ad-data-intelligence-startup-mixrank-raises-1-5m-from-mark-cubam-500-startups/

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jphackworth
Quite an interesting product. I typed a competitor's name in and immediately
saw a huge list of ads they were running. Very helpful in just ten seconds!

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smilliken
As an aside, we're hiring engineers:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3160100>

We're working on interesting problems at scale, like crawling the web and big
data analytics. If this sounds interesting, it's worth reaching out :).

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jstreebin
We're pysched to be in on this one.
[http://blog.raaventures.com/post/14220926611/raaventuresinve...](http://blog.raaventures.com/post/14220926611/raaventuresinvestinmixrank)
Looking forward to working with Scott and Ilya

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badclient
I get how they can crawl ads. But how do they figure out the most effective
ad? The only thing I can think of is that the most effective ad is the most
frequent one. But that isn't necessarily true.

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ntoshev
_MixRank’s search engine for AdSense crawls pages running Google ads, indexing
effectiveness data and estimating ad performance._

That's strange. Crawling Google's ads is prohibited by robots.txt and their
terms of service. And Google tends to enforce this kind of rules.

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dangrossman
There are a half dozen other mass ad crawling services selling the same
service (being able to search and analyze your competitors' ads), dating back
at least several years.

On one hand you'd think if this wasn't permissible, they'd be big targets and
Google would go after them legally. On the other hand, what would the legal
basis for blocking this be?

Someone browsing my website and seeing a Google ad has not agreed to any
Google terms of service. It's a tough argument that a browser is allowed to do
this but a crawler isn't, especially when Google's own crawlers now include
javascript-executing webkit browsers.

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ntoshev
AdWords come from google.com. You'd think this service is not limited to
adsense...

They could enforce it by technical means, by just blocking your IP.

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k33n
Not really. Takes about 5 seconds to get a new IP for an Amazon EC2 instance.

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asanwal
We've used SpyFu before. How is this different/better?

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myared
This addresses Google's content network. You still need SpyFu to target the
search network.

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dwynings
Congrats, Scott & Ilya!

