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Google is hijacking your webturf
Back in December 2007, it was reported that the Canadian telecoms giant Rodgers were hijacking their clients bandwidth and inserting their own messages into the pages people viewed. In particular a lot of attention was being paid to the fact that on visiting the search engine giant Google, a page could be returned with a Yahoo! / Rogers message at the top as the two were doing some co-branding. Now, Google were not overly impressed by this and responded by saying "We are concerned about these reports. As a general principle, we believe that maintaining the Internet as a neutral platform means that carriers shouldn't be able to interfere with web content without users' permission." So a few days later what do they do? They release an update to their very popular Google Toolbar which now results in 404 error pages which return less that 512 bytes displaying alternative URL's for that domain. In effect, bypassing the 404 page and returning alternative results for your initial URL, including a great big Google logo and a Google search box. Now on the face of it this sounds like they are doing much and such the same as Rogers did, hijacking peoples web pages. They are emblazoning YOUR webpage with THEIR logo and THEIR search box. Nasty? Well, it IS permission based. You need to have installed Google Toolbar and accepted the usage policys for this to have happened. But... It's turned on as default. A bit like having to untick "I want to receive your nasty newsletter", they too are using the technique that a lot of people wont turn it off. In fact, more sneakily so as you have to click in amongst the options to do so as opposed to having it staring right at you. I have 2 views on this and would love to hear yours. My view is split, it does provide a useful service to the end user, suggesting alternative domains for them to visit. As far as I am aware these are your own domains so if you were to visit http://www.mysite.com/404.html and get an error, it would suggest you visit http://www.mysite.com. As far as I am aware it will not display other website domains and that is good. However, it also displays a great big clickable Google logo and a search box. An end user MAY use the search box or click on the Google logo, thus directing them away from your site to theirs and possibly to one of your competitors if a search query is done afterwards. This is very very bad. A lot of people use the Google Toolbar, not only web people that download it but it also comes packaged up with all sorts of things. This means a lot of potential customers who have visited a bad URL on your site could potentially get directed elsewhere..... |
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