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Yahoo Sued for Spyware, Typosquatting-Based Ads
An anonymous reader writes to mention a Yahoo! suit involving allegations of spyware and typosquatting-based ads. From the article: "The suit claims that Yahoo displayed these advertisers' online ads via spyware and adware products and on so-called 'typosquatter' Web sites that capitalize on misspellings of popular trademarks or company names. Potentially more explosive is the plaintiff's claim that Yahoo regularly uses its relationship with adware and typosquatting sites to gin up extra revenue around earnings time, alleging that the company is conspiring to boost revenue by partnering with some of the Internet's seamier characters."
Of course, I quit using Yahoo when I started using only Google. Yahoo's website went from being the cleanest and least laden with trickery and pervasive ads to one of the worst.
Google ads at least are text and off to the side. Whether or not they are promoting typosquatting or not they are easy to ignore.
Corporatism != Free Market
Ben Edelman has a breakdown on how Yahoo fund spyware
this is just the tip of the iceberg, Google, Ask Jeeves, MySpace, MyWay,iWon, the list of million dollar companies built from and profiting from these seedy practices goes on, its about time somebody gets the smackdown either in court or via other methods
This apparently isn't about consumers: the plaintiffs are a bunch of pissed off advertisers, who would prefer to interfere with your search results rather than with some parked and forgotten domain. The plaintiffs also refuse to name themselves and use terms like "improper advertising displays" (like advertising speech could somehow be "improper".)
They do have a point. Do you want me to tell you why?
.com or .whatever in their name? Why not filter these searches out?
Lots and lots of typosquatters use Overture's Keyword Selector tool to find the juiciest domains. Try it yourself, try searching for "fool.com" without the quotes, and you'll be able to see the number of people who searched for that domain using one of Yahoo's search bars. This gives you a hint that there are many people who would be typing that domain in the address bar, so if nobody registered it, then the typosquatter goes ahead and registers the domain to make lots and lots of money from ADs.
Now, please remind me, why on earth would Yahoo leave the opportunity to search for keywords that have
My small company lost over $25,000 to google over this... Google was providing "high quality" clicks that were producing one sale in over 1200 clicks. I could walk down the street and slap people across the face and tell them to buy my product and I'd get more sales than one per 1200 people. They're all dirty. Until advertisers figure out and only advertise on selected websites vs the shotgun approach, OR the major search engines take the time to have sale-based payment instead of Pay-Per-Click, the screwing will continue.
Follow these directions should you be afflicted with the Yahoo! Toolbar.
That toolbar is probably the portal for this Spyware and crap. You know, it comes with applications and installs itself (seemingly) sometimes. I've had to remove it countless times, the battle rages on.
Or you can just switch to Firefox. A new version is out, now's as good a time as ever!
My work here is dung.
For instance, if I type "Asia" doesn't google return with :
Did you mean "Send me ur outsourced job plz"
Isn't that indirect squatting?
Raise AdBlock, Mr. Worf. Continual fire, all bannings.
People need to get over the fact the internet is brought to you by companies who are paying huge sums of cash to put their product in front of you and they will find any and every way to get you to see them. This is the big lie. Take a look at a decent history of the Internet, and you'll see that Internet is NOT "brought to you by companies paying huge sums of money to put their product in front of you.." Those companies saw a tool for satisfying their rapacious greed using a publicly funded utility and have since been trying to turn that utility into their own private playground. And they'll probably succeed, since our public officials are almost all whores. We'll remember a brief, shining moment when some kid with a computer and list of html codes could get a message out to hundreds of millions of people. We'll remember a day when an outfit like slashdot could have an idea and be on an even playing field with Microsoft and Sony (at least in the arena of online media). We've got at most another 2 years of a free and open internet before it becomes little more than another television. There might still be some sort of third-tier "public-access" internet, but it'll be slower, harder to get and less powerful. And we'll probably only get that as part of a bigger package, including the new "AT&T brings you the Internet!"
You are welcome on my lawn.
Everyone who is ready to flame Yahoo's "evil" practices should realize that Google does profits from typosquatting too, with their DomainPark service. How many legitimate websites are there that get more than 750,000 page views a month and are just "parked"? Yahoo may be doing something evil, but "do no evil" Google isn't innocent either.
Isn't all the time earnings time for a big public corporate entity? Wow- if they make all that money while only earning for a portion of the year, just think of what they could get if they did it year-round!
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
*Applause*
Well spoken.
I'm not championing the commercialization of the internet, nor am I saying Nike supplied the inspiration. My point is simply that the modern expansion of the internet is undeniably paralelled by corporate involvement in it.
Denying such a correlation is as blasphemous as denying that pr0n was one of the largest contributing factors the the growth of the internet in it's infancy.
Sad, but true. I do in deed remember a time. I'm not naive enough to think grant-funded university projects and student development will carry the internet to new heights. God I would love to see it, but I'm not holding my breath. That's how the robot monkey ninjas get you.
Honestly, this article is like the light that's been shining in our eyes for so long we didn't care anymore. I stopped using Yahoo when it installed a toolbar in my IE(I know, I'm all Firefox now)and began not just pumping, but flooding my PC like N.O. with spyware. Yahoo's a long standing company, and in being long standing, they start getting the shady people inside their ranks, and eventually one of them gets high enough to implement an idea like this. Sadly, this is Capitolism. The Company that can profit the most does the best. If Yahoo is in with typosquatters, so be it! That's their business practice and I didn't find much about it being illegal, just not nice. So while Yahoo didn't break any rules, it only re-enforced the belief of this non-net-savvy person that I should use Google from now on. And didn't Yahoo start this when they had the Full Page Flash Overlay ads?
" i r 1337. j00 a l0z3r "
That talk kinda makes you cry, doesn't it?
That's right..cry those nerdly tears
de-selecting the yahoo tools option in the install has no effect!
(FYI DLing the 56k version of the reader seems to cut out most of the bloat)
"People need to get over the fact the internet is brought to you by companies who are paying huge sums of cash to put their product in front of you and they will find any and every way to get you to see them."
No, internet was brought on as a collbration tool used by universities. If all the big companies disappear off the face of internet, most of the sites that were built by users as a hobby or to share information with the world would still be there and internet would still be 'good' and probably 'a better thing'
Oi...whatever "collbration" was done is done. If all the big comapnies disappear - "most of the sites that were built by users as a hobby or to share information with the world" would fall into complete disrepair because who would give a rats ass if nobody goes on the internet. Then people could make up arbitrary stats like "most people host a site and don't do it to make money". It's fun to make stuff up. Anyone reading this is already biased because chances are the only sample set you have to pull from (people you know) are also nerds.
"who would give a rats ass if nobody goes on the internet." What makes you think nobody will go on the internet? I regularly check hobby sites for hardware hack, discussion groups for cars, business related forums... none of that belongs to a big company. People like to put stuff up online and other people like to view them. Have you heard of 'blogging'???
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Defining Statistics and Social Research
"We'll remember a brief, shining moment when some kid with a computer and list of html codes could get a message out to hundreds of millions of people."
Sounds like spam to me. Not a shining moment in my book.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
"Have you ever heard of blogging?"
No. Bentwookie.com is just a link I like to toss up there because I'm a big fan of befuddlement.
I think you're being a bit naive in thinking that the internet can sustain itself on the work of independently operated sites and users. Without advertising and marketability few sites would be able to sustain themselves. Others rely on services (by your own accusation - blogspot, typepad, etc) which come from major companies which rely on revenue from venture capitalists, investors, and the like; which in my book makes them a corporation.
Business forums - wouldn't exist if business wasn't there to talk about.
Cars - You're telling me you spend hours online discussing cars and in the next breath saying the growth of the internet isn't fueled, in this case even indirectly, by corporate america?
Call me a naysayer, call me a pessimist, call me a beligerent jerk if you want, but you have to accept the fact that the internet isn't soon to be another TV, it has already surpassed the TV in terms that we're all subject to hundreds of times more ads, plugs, and influences - what's more we don't even realize it.
The only question that remains in my mind is did the advertising agency and market do this to us or did we create this market? Chicken? Egg?
This was why I stopped using yahoo like 4 or 5 years ago. =/
#SGVLUG (irc.freenode.net)
I never understood the purpose of these toolbars. I prefer to see content in my windows, not bars and tabs. I just bookmark the advanced search page for Yahoo and Google. (They return just about identical results).
So, the answer to your question is no. This behavior is based on the quarterly earnings startments that publically traded companies need to report on. When your company is publically traded, it is just as important to do business as it is to sell stock.
When sales to invoice (order to cash) processes are days/hours long vs. weeks or months, publically traded companies will do whatever they can to gain more business during the end of a quarter.
Is it bad business? Not really. Is it good business? Definitely not. Is it a fact of behavior for publically traded business try to squeeze every dollar out before the quarter ends? Yes.
"we're all subject to hundreds of times more ads, plugs, and influences - what's more we don't even realize it."
So you are saying the fact that a lot of website is supported by ads justifies spyware and spamming? Going back to your original post, you are just telling us to 'get over it'. I guess you like your spyware and v i a g a r a emails.
It doesn't have to be that way you know. That's why spammers are being sued. If everyone just accept things as they are, there would never be any change for the better.
It's not the government's responsibility to protect you from yourself. If you install spyware or click on the wrong ads, it's your own damned fault, and if you keep paying Yahoo! or anybody else for ads that aren't working, that's your own stupidity, too.
"No, internet was brought on as a collbration tool used by universities."
You're at least closer than the parents. The Internet was created as a U.S. Defense Department research experiment. Universities were (relatively) early adopters.