We have 18,000 currently open restaurants listed on Zomato. Given that we have 98% menu cards, and complete information for every restaurant that is listed with us, anybody can see that this is a huge amount of information to collect and manage. And the fact that we update all this information every 3 months doesn’t make our job any easier. This includes going traveling in scorching heat from restaurant to restaurant, collect their information, and put it online. Right now, we have 30 committed people in our content team who do this day in and day out. To bring the best information to our users, without fail, over and over gain. Let me tell you that it is a hard and thankless job. Only someone who has done it can really appreciate the toil which our people go through to get this done. I have been a proponent of taking the ‘high road’ and have gone through a lot of pain to build what we have in the form of Zomato. Therefore, it is very painful to see all this work being copied by someone else blatantly. I would have ideally let it go if it were only my effort being copied here, but I had to post this to boost the morale of our content team which was obviously furious and dejected when parts of their hard work showed up on a competing website. Before I go explain how Burrp did this to us, let me give you a small background. Any local search company such as ours, most of the times has unique/proprietary data points being shown on the website. These data points are proprietary to the business in a manner of representation and/or collection and any malicious competitor activity can be easily tracked when these data points show up on their website. We have been experimenting with a few business models and have for a few restaurants put our own phone numbers on which we take table reservations on behalf of the restaurant. These instances are very few in number (~1% of our database). So these numbers are our numbers, the restaurant staff doesn’t know about this and these numbers have no business showing up on some other website (even our API does not serve these numbers). Also, we have our own proprietary GPS systems which help us collect very very accurate (within 2 meters) GPS coordinates for restaurants listed on Zomato. So when these coordinates, until the 5th decimal point show up on some other website, we have a problem. Now, we found a few such instances on Burrp.com; these instances are incomplete listings (Burrp didn’t take our data which they thought would be proprietary), but these listings on Burrp have our phone numbers and our GPS coordinates in them. Here is a screenshot:  

Note: I have saved snapshots of these Burrp pages on Freezepage at these URLs: Zinos on Burrp on Freezepage Mangal’s Profile on Burrp on Freezepage Btw, we found these listings by doing a simple “site:burrp.com 49422222” search on Google. 49422222 is a Zomato owned phone number in Delhi. We have found multiple other such instances on Burrp. Now, we have pointed out such issues to Burrp twice earlier and the response we got was:

“This was a user upload, we have nothing to do with this, we will take down the listing. Thanks for keeping an eye on us. And please don’t make a mountain out of a molehill. Burrp maintains 150,000 listings, so we don’t bother about copying your data at all. We don’t do such things.”

Now, this is not a user upload. The ‘user’ who added this listing is a Mangal84, who has added 11052 listings to Burrp (yet) with 0 reviews (!). Clearly a Burrp employee, since May 5, 2009. More about it here: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/mangal-shewale/23/519/867 or http://www.freezepage.com/1316835281MDMFHBHHQU With user uploads, I can understand, shit happens. But even then, you just cannot pass off shit in the name of user uploads. It’s a well known fact that Burrp verifies and moderates every listing upload that is submitted on the website. How could such a thing get through the moderation and verification system? So, if it is indeed some users uploading Zomato data to Burrp’s servers, we strongly recommend that Burrp should either strengthen its moderation systems or shut down the sections of its business which they clearly cannot manage. What I have not been able to understand is the map coordinates available for a few restaurants on their system. I don’t really think that a user would go to the extent of going through our source code, extracting the map coordinates and submitting them to Burrp. As far as I know Burrp doesn’t even have a facility to submit raw map coordinates. And I think there is only a one in a million chance that the user accidentally dropped a pin on a google map which is exactly the same as the super accurate coordinates collected with our GPS systems. I would like to give Burrp the benefit of doubt, but it is highly unlikely that a user is doing this. As shown above, its quite likely that a Burrp employee is behind all this scraping from Zomato. A lot of local search companies manually keep a check on each other for research. Its what everybody calls competitor research. Its done to keep track of things that are going on and new businesses that are coming up. Once any new activity is spotted, the company’s own data collection engine kicks in and gets the information on its own (in a proprietary way) to provide to the user the value that they stand for. Its extremely sad to see such a great product like Burrp resorting to such things to keep itself alive. We used to really respect Burrp for what they have achieved. Now, I would really recommend Burrp to use our API, and at least power its restaurant section data with our content in a clean (and legal) way. Overall, we don’t and can’t really know the extent to which our content has been copied (or uploaded by users!), we are afraid that this might be a large amount of content. It hurts us in our organic search engine rankings, make us lose traffic (directly and indirectly), and also hurts the morale of our team. Given the amount of effort we put into Zomato, there is no way we are going to take this lying down. [Note: I would request the Burrp team not to pin this on Mangal. I am sure she is doing what she has been told to do by her bosses at Burrp or doing what she has not been told to avoid.]