There are many Web search engines, each with a slightly different tech-
nique. But they all rely upon the ability to spider the Web and gather the
data the Web makes available.

These "spiders" are also called "bots." A bot is simply a computer pro-
gram that runs remotely on another machine. Searching is just one exam-
ple of the kinds of things computer "bots" do to one another on the Web.
Some of those other things are awful: "denial of service attack" is an event
where either one or a number of coordinating computers sends repeated re-
quests to a Web page, ultimately overwhelming the server for that page. But
in the main, these "things computers do to each other" have been produc-
tive and extraordinarily creative.

One example of this creativity comes in the context of auction sites. Auc-
tion sites make products available to real-time, wide-scale auctions. eBay is
the most famous, but not the only one. eBay opened in 1995 as a place
where individuals could offer their stuff in an auction to others. The
idea caught on, and competing sites started offering the same service.
Amazon.com has its own auction site, as does Yahoo!.

But then customers interested in auctions faced another "metaproblem." If
they had things they were watching on many different sites, they had the has-
sle of traipsing through all those sites to find what they wanted to watch. So
where there was a problem, the market quickly provided a response. Bidder's
Edge, among others, began to offer a site that did the surfing for you. On one
page you could see the status of all your auctions. And Bidder's Edge prom-
ised to update this information regularly.

In each case, the innovation is the same. The Web is an open architec-
ture; it begs for people to discover new ways to combine the resources it
makes available. In each of these cases, someone did discover a new way of
combining resources. And this discovery then produced a new kind of mar-
ket. Search engines were a defining feature of the original World Wide
Web. And the opportunity to quickly compare prices was one of the early
promises for competition on the Web.

But in each case, too, there is this undeniable fact: When a search engine
spiders the Web, it uses resources of others to build its index. When Best
Book Buys enters Amazon.com, it collects the price Amazon offers by using
Amazon's servers. In a sense, then, we could say that each of these bots _tres-_
_passes_ on the servers of other sites.

To many, this idea of trespassing bots will seem bizarre. But it did not
seem too bizarre to the lawyers at eBay. For eBay didn't want bots that cre-

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