Search By.... Email?

cjjjer writes "The Register has a article on Yelp, the newest local search engine based on your local friends and businesses. Robert X. Cringely over at I, Cringely has another take on this new type of service as well. Seems to me a service like this will only generate a lot of useless emails that will go un-answered. Wait a minute, that sounds a lot like spam."

Comments

Screw this.

[sketerpot]

If you email me and a bunch of other people asking some stupid question that you want me to go to a search engine and answer, I'm going to block email from you. Do not spam me. This is the worst search engine idea ever. Die die die.

And their page uses really sucky JavaScript; have they ever heard of using plain old hyperlinks rather than using javascript to open a popup window? It would make their site much more friendly to---irony coming---search engines. Real search engines.

Re:Screw this.

[lukewarmfusion]

I completely agree. This is on par with people who send me all their email forwards. I will be as rude as necessary to get the point across that I don't appreciate crap in my email inbox.

I, too, am happy to help a friend out when they ask for recommendations on a restaurant or whatever. But if they ask for the recommendation and end their email with "btw, I gave your email address to a few spammers before I sent this to you" then I will be very angry.

I have to deal with this daily already :(

[VE3ECM]

Do you and I *really* need a service where our annoying friends can spam us all day long asking us where to find the best pastrami on rye in town?

Or the best dry cleaner?

Or whatever...
There's always going to be someone who uses Yelp! 10 times a day and annoys you to no end.

It happens already: go take a look in any live journal community.

Spammers collection point?

[DigitalNinja7]

This just screams "give me valid email addresses so I can sell them to spammers!" This service is retarded, just use your email client.