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When Jason Calacanis finds a bully — other than the one he looks at every morning in the mirror, that is — his Brooklyn streetfighting instincts kick in. That's why he's going after Aftervote so hard. His response to a review declaring Aftervote "pimp" and superior to Calacanis' Mahalo? He Twittered that he has "inside info" that they'll be shut down for being "illegal." Of course, Dave Naylor, noted search-engine "optimizer" and the man behind Aftervote, did start the fight when he declared on his blog: "Aftervote will end Mahalo." What's really behind the fight and some choice quotes from the scrap, after the jump.

Aftervote ostensibly tackles the same goal as Mahalo — improving the quality of search results. In addition to human editors, a feature it shares with Mahalo, Aftervote pulls results from the leading search engines and allows users to vote on the best results — something people with propeller hats call "metasearch." It also provides rankings from the leading search engines and other sources to help the user evaluate the quality of links. This is what Calacanis "thinks" is "illegal" — though by "illegal," he just means a violation of competing search engines' terms of service:

inside info: i think aftervote will be shut down soon for breaking the Terms of Service of Google, Yahoo, etc. Metasearch is illegal

But as Jason Duke points out (with his rear end), metasearch is simply scraping data available on the Web. Google and every other search engine does it to Web pages. Aftervote does it and so, for that matter, does Mahalo, Duke argues.

Dave Naylor responds similarly on his own blog:

Hahaha Jason you look all worried mate, http://twitter.com/jasoncalacanis, Drug smuggling is illegal, Meta search engines aren't, But what is making the Google Boys jump around is Search results in side search results, and correct me if I'm wrong but should that mean Mahalo shouldn't be listed ??

Jason attempts to play nice while still holding his line, with a clarification of what "illegal" means, in Naylor's comments:

I love the idea of syndicating the ranking information form Google, Yahoo, and Ask. However, I was told specifically that it is against the terms of service and that they would take action against folks doing meta search. It you look in their terms of service they say it's not allowed.

So, if you can get them to change the TOS I'm 100% behind you brother! I'd love to put the Google rank on our pages.

To which, another Aftervote employee responds with some of his own "inside" trash talk:

Jason: Just because you cant get access, does not mean nobody else can. In regards to google, we do have permission, same with alexa, compete and stumbleupon- at MSN and yahoo, they could not grant "permission" but also promised there would be no issues, and that many others did this. As I wrote before- Perhaps google does not want you bringing down the quality of there image any more than you have, with all the negative press mahalo gets (especially from the VC community- I overheard some guys from clearstone saying that you must have been on crack when you pitched it to them)

... -This is how google suggested we program it!- You are indeed a fool jason, especially with the hundreds, if not thousands of "pagerank checkers" which "illegaly" get googles ranking data-

Which leaves Calacanis incredulous but conciliatory (mostly):

Google really gave permission to pull their data? Interesting... do you know who at Google gave the greenlight for pulling their data? I had a very senior person there say don't do it (I'll find out if they want to go public with that statement)...

In terms of Clearstone who said that? I've have term sheets here that say they were very interested in investing in Mahalo, and I'm on the board of one of their companies (ThisNext) and in their office every week. If they said I was on crack, perhaps that was a compliment intended to describe my energy level?! :-)

all the best,

Jason

With this battle apparently over (and Calacanis scrambling to duplicate Aftervote's "illegal" functionality), we anxiously await the next compelling dispute between the creators of these otherwise deadly boring search engines.