One of my friends was cribbing about how the quality of Google’s search results seemed to have gone down the toilet lately. Some questions later it was obvious this was not the usual griping about Pagerank. He sent me a screenshot which he said “has junk inserted at the top” (I’ve obscured personal details in this image).

Look at the third result in the screenshot. Unless Pagerank has really been flushed down into the sewer, there’s no way qksrv.net would feature as #3 for a search. Some googling later I found this post dated July 14 –

there appears to be a form of adware that is able to hijack google results and insert ads to make them appear as if they were real results.

The poster goes on to provide this screenshot, in which another well known ad server (click.atdmt.com) features at #1.

I’d love to know what particularly ugly piece of spyware is behind this. So would Google’s lawyers, I’m sure.

Update June 28: CNET’s now got the story. If you think your PC has been troubling you, get a good Spyware remover like Spybot Search and Destroy and see if there are any of these pests on your system. And oh, switching to Mozilla Firefox as your primary browser is strongly recommended.

Comments Off

I have some unused Gmail invitations, write to me if you need one.

2 Comments

The (afaik) undocumented Amigos page on Slashdot lists recent journal entries from all your Friends. Great, now all I need is an RSS feed for this.

Comments Off

Life imitates art: Native American Wireless ISP launches. Coming soon: Liberation Spectrum.

Comments Off

Why not go to MP3 Lizard for all your indie MP3 needs?

Comments Off

New from Google Labs - Google Personalized Search. I tried the classic “asp” search with mixed results (the current prefs directory is skewed towards software), but overall this service shows promise, especially since the UI does not get in the way (and marks personalized results clearly). Wish: Search URLs which included a (read-only) key into my personalization profile so that emailed/IMed URLs would result in consistent results.

Comments Off

Like Luke Hutteman notes, spam into my Hotmail Inbox is now down to about 1 a day, from the pre-update 10-15 a day. Great!

Comments Off

Kazaa finds its first legit film: Supari, starring Nandita Das and Rahul Bose.

Comments Off

(Via my Referer Log) As you look at it for the first few milliseconds, malixya looks like a perfectly normal, well-designed personal website. Then you realize that this isn’t quite your typical weblog. Welcome to the new world of porn spam.

Comments Off

(Via Slashdot) Gator forces site to remove Spyware label. Interesting. I don’t mind if someone installs Gator to hear about shopping bargains. The reason I don’t like Gator is that it arrives surreptitously (no, a IE do-you-want-to-install-GMT dialog is not good enough), and eats up RAM and CPU cycles on the user’s PC even when no browser is running.

For an example of a tracking application done right, check out the Google Toolbar– in its advanced mode, it does send data back to Google, but no sane person would call it spyware.

The day Gator stops using drive-by and pop-up downloads to distribute their product, I’ll stop calling it that name. Until then, in my opinion, Gator remains spyware.

Comments Off