Bryan Brickley SearchFeed Sr Director Reaches Out

by Jeremy Schoemaker on April 18, 2007 · 40 comments

I was contacted by Searchfeed’s Senior Director Bryan Brickley while I was at SES NYC.

Hi Jeremy,

It’s absolutely amazing to me you would go through all the time and trouble to create a page and post my guys feedback – http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/09/24/searchfeed-please-take-me-off-all-lists-already/, when they were only trying to help monetize your website traffic and generate some extra revenue for you. If you put just half the effort into listening to one of them, you would realize we have a number of great integration tools and could really benefit your bottem line. But regardless, please remove these posts as you are in violation of our confidentiality notices, posted below, for disseminating these emails to your audience. Please confirm once this has been done.

Best regards,

Bryan Brickley
Searchfeed Sr. Director/GM
www.SearchFeed.com

Well of course I replied and said I would not be removing the post…

To which Bryan promptly responded with:

From: “Bryan Brickley”
Date: April 18, 2007 2:46:20 PM CDT
To: “Jeremy Schoemaker”
Subject: RE: Searchfeed.com Legal Notice

Ok, so how confidential is your domain portfolio?

I responded and said I was unclear… but then other people in the field said that they thought he was threatning to release all the domains I own to the public… wow what a news flash that would be. I have never tried to hide the fact I own a ton of domains.

So Searchfeed what are you going to do publicly list all the 9,000 domains I own? Wow you guys are real class acts… No wonder I hear the stories I do about your company.

Companies have told me searchfeed traffic IS PURE SHIT.

Now this company is very interesting.

It seems they:

a) Scrape WHOIS data to contact domain owners about commercial interests (against the rules last I checked)
b) Blatantly violate the canned spam act ~~spamming~~ high volume email deployment with no option to unsubscribe.
c) Threaten to release your domain portfolio they have scraped together if you don’t bow down to them.

Yay, sounds like someone I want to do business with how about you?

About the author...

Jeremy Schoemaker – who has written 2415 posts on ShoeMoney.com.

Hi I am Jeremy Schoemaker and ShoeMoney.com is my blog. 99% of the post here are done by me but you will see others occasionally make guest posts. This blog is fun to write but for my day job I run several online companies.

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{ 38 comments… read them below or add one }

1 CPA Affiliates April 18, 2007 at 6:56 pm: Wow man takes some balls on there end to even ask you to remove it. I have played with searchfeed and while in some results they performed ok… (in the realm of 3rd tier) but overall there is better places to get traffic.

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2 Jake April 18, 2007 at 7:08 pm: 9,000? Thats it?

You gotta step your game up Jeremy

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3 Tyler Banfield April 18, 2007 at 7:11 pm: Searchfeed traffic is pure shit. I’ve tried doing arbitrage with them a few times, and nothing ever converts, even though I’m using the same landing pages that do quite well with other engines. Searchfeed is an eighth-tier engine at best.

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4 Searchfeed Sucks April 18, 2007 at 7:25 pm: Damn, and their people seemed so nice too, lol.

I like to print out their spammy emails on stuff I call ‘paper’ and then use it to start a fire with on cold nights.

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5 ShoeMoney April 18, 2007 at 7:53 pm: I have been way more on the selling end of domains in the last 3 months

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6 ToddW April 18, 2007 at 7:59 pm: I think it’s one thing to ask for removal and then when it’s not done they threaten you with crap… the threat isn’t even “we will sick our lawyer on you” it’s a THREAT to your business in general. I think you should sue them if they make that information public, lost revenue yadi yadi.

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7 just some guy April 18, 2007 at 8:35 pm: If Jeremy never agreed to keep their emails confidential, then he has no obligation to keep them confidential. Welcome to trade secret law.

Sounds like Searchfeed may have committed a felony by threatening Jeremy:

extortion
n. obtaining money or property by threat to a victim’s property or loved ones, intimidation, or false claim of a right (such as pretending to be an IRS agent). It is a felony in all states, except that a direct threat to harm the victim is usually treated as the crime of robbery. Blackmail is a form of extortion in which the threat is to expose embarrassing, damaging information to family, friends or the public.
See also: blackmail robbery theft

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8 Icheb April 18, 2007 at 8:51 pm: Hey Brickley, I’m laughing at you all the way from Germany.

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9 Jimmy Daniels April 18, 2007 at 8:55 pm: This was the random photo as I read this, http://www.shoemoney.com/gallery/d/10867-4/seschicago2006+401.jpg who wants to bet that was the same look Bryan had on his face when he clicked send?

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10 bloard April 18, 2007 at 8:59 pm: Do a Yahoo search for searchfeed and I think you will see why they are wanting it down. Too bad they just earned this post 10 more “searchfeed” backlinks from me on different sites. They should probably start keeping an eye on google now.

Somebody needs to tell them about letting sleeping dogs lie… b/c it looks like this one just woke up and is going to bite them in the arse.

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11 Brent April 18, 2007 at 9:27 pm: This guy Brickley sounds like a real douche. So do all the other fake sounding names in those emails.

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12 MM April 18, 2007 at 9:43 pm: Why do these people take this stuff so personally? He runs a shitty company with shitty business practices. They make unsolicited calls and send unsolicited e mails to people. They should expect to piss a lot of people off.

This guy should act like he’s older than 12 and just move on. Who in their right mind would threaten and piss someone off with an audience the size of yours that totally comprise of his company’s target market.

Douche.

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13 Nathan Hannig April 18, 2007 at 9:44 pm: Yeah that seemed really fake/bad. Nice job at looking out for stuff like this.

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14 Hip Hop April 18, 2007 at 10:28 pm: SearchFeed is pretty cool

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15 coop April 18, 2007 at 10:56 pm: Well time for the Ole Shoe to knock em down. (oh and i HATE searchfeed) Remember the mybloglog exploits? maybe we can see a bit of that with SF.

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16 Ferrarislave April 19, 2007 at 12:06 am: haha, these guys are… I’m not going to say it. You don’t need another libel case on your blog comments. Anyway, these guys are trash.

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17 BlueBobbo April 19, 2007 at 2:04 am: That’s a bump. How ridiculous… Very professional, very professional…………

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18 BlueBobbo April 19, 2007 at 2:05 am: They’re only good for contextual arbitrage, lmao… That’s what I was able to use them for anyway.

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19 darfur April 19, 2007 at 4:20 am: I would have left this on the frontpage main story for a couple days. You’re pretty nice.

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20 Tom April 19, 2007 at 7:20 am: What is amazing is they are picking on a big dog. If they went after someone small who would be intimidated by legal fees and headaches it might be effective.

However, unless you are a moron you know Jeremy earns. And when you earn you can pay retainers to attorneys and come back hard and mean if there is any damage done to you.

These boys just kicked over a fire ant hill now. First they will get killed in the serps, and then if they do anything from an extortion or exposure angle, they will be completely destroyed.

Another example of business suicide by email.

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21 TeamTutorials April 19, 2007 at 8:40 am: It’s like that have bots click through to your page, page you never see any ad clicks after that.

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22 Jason April 19, 2007 at 9:42 am: If I did that, I’d need to refill my inkjet ink 2-3 times per day. And fresh clean paper has much better uses. Hitting “delete” is a much more satisfying option for me.

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23 Amanda April 19, 2007 at 12:24 pm: I hope to god 9,000 is just a random number you made up. I myself own about 15 domains. only 3 of which have ads on them. and people think I’m insane with that many domains

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24 Brian Despain April 19, 2007 at 1:20 pm: It’s pretty childish IMO. But what to expect? Releasing Jeremy’s domains isn’t illegal or even a trade secret though. That Whois data is public information. The fact that he threatened to do it is moronic.

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25 coop April 19, 2007 at 2:35 pm: well it could be damaging. him threatening to do so is illegal. it’s blackmail. it’s just dumb.

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26 Wealth Junkie April 19, 2007 at 2:57 pm: Searchfeed traffic is terrible. I’m not sure what percentage are bots, but the number seems to be high. I complained about the duplicate IPs and strange user agents of the traffic and never heard back from them. I won’t be spending another dime with those folks.

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27 Pedro Sttau April 19, 2007 at 3:07 pm: what surprised me was the fact that it was the SEO of the company to come foward with the threat.
What a bad example of the corporate act.
If you want to act like an idiot, use your lawyer, that’s the essence of they’re existence.

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28 Ken Savage April 19, 2007 at 4:22 pm: Throw some affordable lists up and I’ll take a look. 3+ years old preferably.

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29 Brian Despain April 19, 2007 at 4:28 pm: Coop – it’s not really a threat nor is it “illegal” because it’s public information. Anyone can put together a list of Jeremy’s domains by crawling the whois database. Jeremy might be able to sue in civil court but the fact that the information is already public is pretty good defense.

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30 Mike Seiler April 20, 2007 at 12:38 am: It’s not public info if he’s talking about ones with WHOIS privacy enabled.

If that’s the case, then I fail to see how that’s not blackmail.

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31 Eric Lander April 20, 2007 at 7:01 am: Using SearchFeed as a legitimate service for your business is probably best suited for the same people who drive by a Starbucks, a Dunkin’ Donuts and a local cafe just to get their coffee at a McDonalds.

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32 Brian Despain April 20, 2007 at 8:16 am: I don’t think Shoe has his domains privacy enabled. It’s too expensive and usually not worth the trouble (I only own 1300 or so domains and it’s not worth it).

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33 Brian Mark April 20, 2007 at 2:34 pm: This was while we were waiting for the party bus, right? Yeah… dumb move. They should pick a battle they have a chance to win.

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34 Paul. April 20, 2007 at 3:37 pm: Stupid Stupid.

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35 Andy April 20, 2007 at 7:23 pm: Oh yeah, google’s got him too. He sure has made a great name for himself… http://www.google.com/search?q=bryan+brickley

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36 Vijay April 22, 2007 at 5:05 am: Now I know who exactly to do business with.. Business is a pleasure with SearchFeed

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37 jim April 27, 2007 at 8:43 am: You would think people would learn… in order to get bad press fixed, you need to fix the reason why the bad press occurred in the first place – NOT demand it be removed and then threaten blackmail when someone doesn’t comply. Geeze…

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