https://medium.com/against-surveillance-capitalism/how-a-chinese-company-built-a-250-million-search-hijacking-empire-35f957566852
commentary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21743941
Noticed this one this morning. The medium post got removed with a 410 status and saying the 'account was pending investigation'. The post has since re-appeared with a bunch of sourced attached.
Seems like someone's not happy with being outed.
The top one on that list straight up says it intercepts searches and redirects them to their engine. I am not sure you could call that fraud.
Yeah, definitely shady but possibly some variations are legal, in some countries.
Someone had commented that Bing ads were used to drive the revenue, a decent chunk of money for them also.
Firefox have something in their ToS that plugins can't do this kind of thing, but given its current market share not a huge game changer.