eBay has had several disputes with auction aggregator services which accumulate data from different auction sites so that a consumer can see what is available at all these different site. The advantage for the buyer is the ability to see if a product available on eBay might be available at a lower asking price on a different site. One such dispute occurred in 1999 with an aggregator service known as AuctionWatch. The AuctionWatch site offers a "Universal Search Function" which allows users to access the price, product, description, and bidding history from popular auction sites such as eBay, Yahoo, and amazon.com. For example, if a user were interested in Boston Red Sox baseball memorabilia, that individual could check the AuctionWatch site to ascertain all of the Red Sox memorabilia available for auction across multiple sites.
AuctionWatch relied on spider technology to locate this data at these different auction sites. A spider is a robotic search engine that can crawl through sites many times a day to extract shopping data. According to Karen Solomon, "The benefits of bots for consumers are indisputable, but some merchants are less than thrilled about the technology's parasitic presence