Hi experts,

I'm interested in building a city portal around top world,
entertainment, sports and geographic specific news using a metanews
engine. Before I actually get a programmer to develop this product I
want a general understanding and opinion on the legalities of
metasearch.
 
To explain further, metasearch engines search the big search engines
and display the results in their website. I am unaware as to whether
there is mutual consent or mutual benefit between the metasearch
engines and the original search engines being searched or if it's just
not an issue.

So to be specific with my question, would there be anything wrong with
creating a metanews engine to crawl the news engines that exist ( I
can only think of two. ) and parse that data into webpages?

Is it copyright infringement or just "internet business as usual"?

regards,
newfiesheek

If I understand your intentions, it has been done in a broader subject
base by numerious persons, so you are unlikely to be charged with
premeditated crime.
 We can, however be sure lawyers are working hard trying to devise
class suits which will bring other lawyers big fees even if the class
suit fails.
 While lawyers are greedy they are concerned about the PR of their
"profession" so perhaps you will not be bothered.   Neil