How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire

[BoL]

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.

[littleman]

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.

[BoL]

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.