Oodle Raises $11 million

Classified search engine Oodle got a pile of cash today, $11 million from new investor JAFCO Ventures and the leaders of their previous $5 million round, Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures. Like LiveDeal, Edgeio, and Vast, Oodle repackages and aggregates classified listings from around the web to make them easily searched by category, attributes, and location. Google Base also dipped its feet into this territory. Oodle’s model is taking on nearly every established vertical search by hosting listings for cars, real estate, rentals, jobs, personals, merchandise, tickets, pets, and services.

Oodle has expanded its listings through direct postings and a series of local listings partners, which it syndicates on sites like Yell.com, Local.com. include Engage.com, Local.com, ticket sellers, real estate brokers, colleges, and newspapers. However, Last year they lost their Craigslist feed. Edgeio and Vast are growing through slightly different ways. Edgeio has been partnering up with feeds from international sites, earning revenue by splitting listing fees (Edgeio marketplaces is a good example). Vast has been growing by crawling the deep web that lies behind login and search forms.

Oodle reports 20 million active listings from more than 75,000 sources in the US and the UK, when compared to Edgeio’s over 100 million international listings and Vast’s 25 million classified listings across 70,000 sites. Oodle, however, has some more advanced search features than these others, adding price tracking and maps where it makes sense. Their price tracking is a more basic version of what Mpire is offering in the shopping vertical.

Disclosure: Michael Arrington is a founder and director of Edgeio.

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