27 August 2007

Ancestry.com Nothing but Theifs

I pulled the link off of my blog to Ancestry.com after what has transpired today. I will no longer promote them! They are thieves.

I have been working hard to transcribe and place information on Genealogy Trails, Kootenai
County, Idaho website, which I'm hosting. Only to find out today that Ancestry is spidering our websites that we offer for free and gladly put up to share with other researches to put on theirsubscription based, pay to view site! This is BS! THEY ARE CHARGING OTHER PEOPLE TO FIND OUR FREE WEBPAGES!!!!!

I friend was telling me how they were so quick to sue someone for placing one copy of a census page on their website that pertained to their research that came from Ancestry.com's database. But they think they have the right to steal our work for their paid subscription users.

Well I just needed to vent. Now I'm back to putting more information on my site and finding out a way that I can put on my site that our information is on the internet for FREE. So when our pages show up on Ancestry's subscription pages people will see they are being charged in part for information they can see for free. I'm sure they will now be charging more for this added feature too! Jerks!

7 comments:

Miriam Robbins said...

Kimberly Powell over at About.com: Genealogy has also blogged about this here.

Miriam Robbins said...

Janice Brown of Cow Hampshire also is complaining here.

Untangled Family Roots said...

Thanks miriam for the links. Yes both of them have a great deal of information on this. So it's appreciated that you shared this with all of us too.

After reading their blogs I did a little experiment of my own......For pete's sake they have cached my personal blog...not even this one about genealogy....but my personal blog probably because it does have a few articles about my personal genealogy researching. God this is highway robbery. The least they can do is ask permission or as Jannice Brown put it compinsate those of us who are memebers of their site for the use of our hard work for their paid memebers. This is rediculous. I put this post up yesterday when I was tired, irritated and hadn't had a lot of time to look into it further, but the more I think about it and look into it the more irritated I get!

Thanks Miriam

Susan K said...

Hi, Amy. What is the link to their server where they have the stuff cached?

I've posted about this, and prepared a (free! please use and post!) parody screenshot of Ancestry's home page.

Untangled Family Roots said...

Susan, The only thing I can figure out as I have only been playing around with this for one day is that you can go here http://www.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=1162 and use this search engine to look for webpages that have the information you are looking for. I did search for things on my sites and the ironic thing is that old posts from my personal blog That's Life that were genealogy subjects came up, but not this blog.....go figure. Also the Genealogy Trails that I am transcribing for had some of the sites come up, but not the new Kootenai County one that I am hosting. So I believe that this is old cached pages from our sites. They don't seem to have the more recent stuff that we have put on our sites. At least that what I've seen so far.

With that being said I will say that they have expressed to ......let's just say it came through the grape vine that they will be making that part of thier site available for free. Which I don't have a problem with them providing links to our sites as long as it's free. It gets us exposure. I just have a real problem with them taking what we offer for advice, transcribed records, and help in any way for free and charging others for it.

I hope that helps
Amy

Alexisnexus said...

Here is another website talking about this issue with Ancestry.com http://familyoralhistory.us/news/view/ancestrycom_scrapes_websites/

Unknown said...

This is after the fact, but check out ancestry's new researcher connection service. They act like it's their idea when genealogyfreelancers.com had the idea first last year. Just another case of running over the little guy with no regard who they hurt in the process.

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