[Mycroft] Ad-Supported search plugins: What gives??

[Yop83]

Well, five minutes after sending my email, I found a couple of january messages
talking about that exact issue:
http://www.mozdev.org/pipermail/mycroft/2006-January/002149.html
and
http://www.mozdev.org/pipermail/mycroft/2006-January/002147.html
and more... (look in the january 2006 archive)

So sorry for not doing my little bit of homework before :-)

Now I know that Charles would prefer to not clutter the mailing list with this
subject, but I'll just mention a couple of things...

First of all, I appreciate the hard work you've put (and are putting) into the
whole mycroft project...

But, nonetheless, I really think that those ad-supported plugins are not the
way  to go...

To your credit, you do mention that those plugins "support mycroft" (albeit
without explaining what they do to support it).

But I don't think that once/if the general public (or at least the more geeky
ones :P) realises what really happens behind the scene (being redirected to an
advertisement company that probably logs all the info it can get from your HTML
request including your geographic location and the keyword you searched for)
that they'd be all swell with that support idea...

Maybe putting a classic "donation" button (either using paypal or any other big
money exchange site) would be more effective? I know that lots of sourceforge
projects do have such a feature and they seem to be happy with the result (to
my limited knowledge, anyway)...

I would also like to ask why, if it's such a great way to make a buck, haven't
you included those redirection in ebay USA instead of focusing on relatively
small countries as India (small in terms of internet users) and Canada (small
in... general terms ;) )??
Did you want to test the waters before going full-bloom on that scheme?

Anyway, that's my two cents, thank you!
--Gabriel Branchaud



> Hi!
> 
> First of all, I haven't done any extensive researchs on this issue and so I
> apologize in advance if this was discussed before now.
> 
> I'm using Firefox under Windows and I use MyCroft to add search engines to my
> "search bar".
> 
> Being Canadian, I have installed the ebay Canada search plugin ("eBay Canada
> (Support MyCroft)" by Charles Caygill). The URL of the file is:
> http://mycroft.mozdev.org/install.php/0/ebay-ca.src
> 
> But, since the 28/12/05 version (or maybe the one before), this plugin goes
> through an online advertisement company BEFORE redirecting you to ebay!
> 
> Here's the relevant script part (line 12 of the .src file):
>
"action="http://www.qksrv.net/click-1885629-8417593?loc=http://search.ebay.ca/search/search.dll""
> 
> You can, obviously, easily remove the "qksrv.net/" part and obtain a valid
> and
> functional plugin that goes directly to eBay. But that is not the point!
> 
> The point is that this redirection is completely hidden to the end-user
> unless
> he or she:
> *Opens the .src file and looks through the code
> or
> *Sends an empty query through the plugin (hit enter with an empty field).
> 
> I did the latter, thinking that I'd land on ebay.ca home page. But NO! I
> landed
> on that web page: http://www.cj.com/qksrv.jsp
> 
> It is also quite probable that other more or less popular plugins have been
> modified to include redirection...
> 
> It is something that will be removed and stricly frowned upon, right?
> It's not a way to really "support Mycroft" (as the plugin title seems to
> imply), right?
> 
> --Gabriel Branchaud



	

	
		
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