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Yahoo Sued for Spyware, Typosquatting-Based Ads

Posted by Zonk on Wed May 03, 2006 07:30 AM
from the double-whammy dept.
Businesses Yahoo! Government The Courts The Internet News
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."
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[+] Google Propping Up Typosquatting Biz? 279 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Google is making oodles of cash placing ads on a vast sea of otherwise vacant Web sites that do little more than capitalize on misspelled domain name names, according to a story in today's Washington Post. From the story: 'Google Inc., which runs the largest ad network on the Internet, is making millions of dollars a year by filling otherwise unused Web sites with ads. In many instances, these ad-filled pages appear when users mistype an Internet address, such as BistBuy.com. This new form of advertising is turning into a booming business that some say is cluttering the Internet and could be violating trademark rules.'"
[+] Your Rights Online: Law Prof Characterizes Yahoo Suit as Extortion 90 comments
netbuzz writes "Fair comment or libel? A law prof/blogger calls those behind the class-action suit against Yahoo 'extortionists.' The targeted lawyers, who include spyware/adware expert Ben Edelman, are not amused." From the article: "Goldman, who according to his blog 'holds leadership positions in the American Bar Association and the Computer Law Association,' addresses the merits of the suit in a generally academic fashion before winding up for the big finish: 'I think these lawsuits are nothing more than a shakedown for cash,' he concludes. 'Even unmeritorious class action lawsuits are expensive to defend, so the plaintiffs' lawyers can exploit those defense costs for their personal largesse. They can make this argument to defendants: settle with me for a fraction of your total expected defense costs, and we're both better off (defendants save some defense costs, plaintiffs' lawyers grab some personal loot).'"
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Yahoo Sued for Spyware, Typosquatting-Based Ads 50 Comments More /

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  • Interesting (Score:4, Interesting)

    by WCMI92 (592436) on Wednesday May 03 2006, @07:33AM (#15252893) Homepage
    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.

  • Full description (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 03 2006, @07:35AM (#15252905)

    Ben Edelman has a breakdown on how Yahoo fund spyware [benedelman.org]

    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

    • 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 screw
      • It's still better than T.V. advertising, or national newspaper advertising.

        You are only paying for people who followed the link
        not for people who have just seen it.

        Newspaper advertising cost is based on circulation
        T.V. on expected audience figures.

        roughly.
      • Just out of curiosity, how did you measure "sales per click"? I'm assuming that you measure the number of sales you got received from people who clicked the ad and then bought your product during that session, but how do you know there weren't others who clicked your ad, saw your product, then decided to come back later directly through your URL to buy the product? Seems kind of difficult to sort out I would imagine. Of course a lot of the clicks may be fradulent, but meausring the success of your ad by

      • 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 screwin

        • Your post would be insightful were it not for:

          1. Spyware which automagically clicks ads to earn revenue for the spyware affiliate (yes, Google does try to weed these bastards out but they're not 100% successful)
          2. Competitors paying people to surf and click on other companies' ads
          3. Sites which display ads and run the "get paid to surf the web" scams, where they pay you for every ad you click on their sites

          Not all click-through advertisements are legitimate, and I can imagine
        • Google sales arn't that bad, they sold you didn't they. That is googles real market (just the same as yahoo or MSN etc.), sellin to the sellers not the buyers because the sellers pay for adds whether or not they actually generate any sales from them.

          When it comes to webvertising and it's low entry cost it all just becomes spamwords and spamsence, it is so flooded with bad companies and bad products that the customers just start ignoring it all.

      • It's not Google that's dirty, it's your company that's stupid. Google delivers exactly what they promise: impressions and click-throughs, and they give you near real-time reports. They also let you set spending limits. If it's not working for you, you can figure that out long before you spend $25k.
    • 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.

  • What's going on here? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 03 2006, @07:36AM (#15252921)
    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".)

    • like advertising speech could somehow be "improper".

      Jesus, I'd like to just see some proper advertising speech again before I die.

      Old school proper advertising speech:

      "Our car has more hp than either Ford or Chevy. It's better. Buy it."

      Modern school improper advertising speech:

      "Look at my dog's ass. Ugly, ain't it?"

      Old school proper advertising speech:

      "I'm hot. Buy this car and I'm yours, big boy."

      Modern school improper advertising speech:

      "I hate that car."

      What's with that "silly little fairy" ad? 'Cause an

    • Actually, I imagine the advertisers are more pissed off that they're paying twice for the same click.

      A comment above contained a link to How Yahoo Funds Spyware [benedelman.org]. A relevant quote:

      Search for "computer repair" at any major search engine, and Claria adds a popunder giving Yahoo Overture ads for that same term. Sponsored link popunders also target specific web sites. Visiting Dell often yields a Claria popunder of Yahoo Overture ads for "computer." Claria's provision of Yahoo Overture sponsored links rais

    • >The plaintiffs also refuse to name themselves

      _Crafts by Veronica_ is the lead plaintiff in the complaint [washingtonpost.com]. It's normal for a class action suit to say "All others similarly situated": that's what makes it a class action suit.

      >who would prefer to interfere with your search results rather than with some parked and forgotten domain

      Which is what they paid for. Clicks from search result pages are more valuable than clicks from spyware. Yahoo is accused of charging for one and intentionally delivering the ot

  • They have a point! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 03 2006, @07:37AM (#15252927)
    They do have a point. Do you want me to tell you why?

    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 .com or .whatever in their name? Why not filter these searches out?
    • That ties in with one of the most commom errors by people new to the web typing the web address they want into the search box on their default yahoo/MSN/whatever home page, rather than the address bar. I've seen tons of grannies, housewives, jocks, and other stereotypical net newbies do this, even after corrected they still find it "easier" since it's where the cursor starts out when they fire up the browser. Of course, it usually brings up the site they wanted as the first result, but it still pipes in a

      • Hell, even I do that half the time, and I've been using the net since before Tim Berners-Lee first put together the letters W-W-W. It's just habit; I use the search bar more often than the address bar, so that's where I gravitate to. Since Google pulls up the right page more often than not it's not a habit that's worth correcting.

        Typosquatting is a problem, but not enough of one to insist that search engines somehow try to filter out terms that look like URLs or domain names and break a very useful (if

    • Now, please remind me, why on earth would Yahoo leave the opportunity to search for keywords that have .com or .whatever in their name? Why not filter these searches out?

      For the simple reason that they are a business, they need to make money to satisfy shareholders, and it's easy to do. And best of all, it's not strictly illegal, only the practice of double-dipping the customer is illegal.

    • I think this a philosophical issue. Is it better to have a mal formed or unregisted domain return a 404 or a list of alternative sites? Some would feel that running everything typed into the URL line should pass through a search engine so if the user made a mistake alternatives could be presented. Others would say that browser should simple do the best with a URL and try to find a domain. In practical expereince this means that one browser would take th input amazon, run it through a search engine, and

  • Remove the Toolbar! (Score:4, Informative)

    by eldavojohn (898314) * <my/.username@@@gmail.com> on Wednesday May 03 2006, @07:56AM (#15253048) Homepage Journal
    Follow these directions [microsoft.com] 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!
    • We had massive problems with the Yahoo toolbar out at the university I used to work at. Not only did it portal in all the spyware we could ever choke on, it was often installed by way of some sites that our lab computer users were fond of visiting.

      Is it just me or are 90% of these helpful little utilities nothing more that spyware in the end, toolbars and accelerators just bog down the machine and sprout security leaks like a zarking seive.
    • I had Yahoo toolbar slip in with an install of adobe acrobat reader. What does the yahoo toolbar have to do with the adobe reader? I know I should have been more careful, but Adobe reader used to be one of the least invasive programs. Now I have to worry about it installing things that shouldn't even be there in the first place.
      • Adobe reader is a piece of crap in itself. Can anyone explain why it has become so huge >16 meg - and hasn't added anything discernible to me? From 1.4mb for version 2, to 16 mb for version 7 - what the hell does it do different?
    • I think I tried warning people a year or so ago about this when I noted that installing Yahoo Messenger automatically dropped my set security levels (mine were always set to maximum security) and re-activated ActiveX in my IE settings. (And I don't use IE, I just max out it's security and disable everything possible in it to reduce the risk of potential exploits.) No surprise that Yahoo doing that after it's installed would leave one open to spyware and other useless crap.

  • Doesn't this mean Google? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.
  • Everyone who is ready to flame Yahoo's "evil" practices should realize that Google does profits from typosquatting too, with their DomainPark [google.com] 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.
    • Again, do you think "he's bad too" can make everything ok ? Guessed so. You could probably fairly quickly assemble a list of other not-innocent-either companies. That will not make Yahoo (or the others) any less "bad".

  • around earnings time


    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
  • 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?

  • Would someone sue Adobe? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by a_greer2005 (863926) on Wednesday May 03 2006, @09:06AM (#15253560)
    ...for force-bundling the yahoo spy/spam/crudware with Adobe reader, and even the FULL RETAIL version of Acrobat PRO 7? when I (or the company I work for) pay $300+ for an app, I/we dont want the bulls**t!

    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)

      • I had the same problem and did discover that you can download it from the adobe website without it insisting on installing the yahoo toolbar. The auto update does give you yahoo though, and their photograph album software (gah).
        Yahoo are only one of the idiots that do this, my son regularly fills IE with bogus toolbars from some of the games sites he visits but as we use firefox it isn't a problem, I just edit the registry every few weeks and dual boot linux and remove the DLL's.
        Amusingly the M$ anti-spyw
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    • Re:In other news (Score:4, Insightful)

      by PopeRatzo (965947) on Wednesday May 03 2006, @08:26AM (#15253276) Homepage Journal
      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!"
      • "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.

    • Re:In other news (Score:4, Insightful)

      by lashi (822466) on Wednesday May 03 2006, @09:06AM (#15253564) Homepage
      "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'
      • "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.
        • "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'???
            • "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

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