[Mycroft] RE: Affiliate Links

[Charles Caygill]

Gabriel,

I'll try and answer a couple of the points you raise.

Starting from the bottom - the eBay.com (ie US) plugin doesn't do the same
because my application was declined for that program - the different eBay
sites seem to have different criteria. (And I removed the link in eBay.in
because it was worthless despite a billion plus potential audience.)

Also, I'd just like to reiterate that they are the official eBay affiliate
links -see for example, http://affiliates.ebay.co.uk/. I would be much
happier if they used an in-house scheme like Amazon but that's not my
decision unfortunately. I realise that some people may be concerned about
their info being logged but personally I'm really not too worried about
Commission Junction or Tradedoubler (the two programs I use) having the
info. I care far more about governments that want to see my records than a
company which may use the info to try and target ads at me... which I ignore
the same as all the spam I get promising me a "bigger endowment."

The 'empty query' is really a bug with the implementation as plugins that
use google to search a site suffer the same issue - try one of the
university plugins - it should use the searchform value.

I've added a line in the key at the bottom of all search results which
hopefully makes it a bit clearer what (Support Mycroft) links actually do.

I'm not planning on removing the links though. I don't think that a donation
button would be as effective and unless anyone especially wants to donate to
Mycroft, I'd rather eBay, Amazon, et al. paid than individual users paid
(yes, I realise that they will pass on the cost eventually). If anyone
really wants to donate to Mycroft, I'll happily make arrangements ;-)

I hope this answers your questions even if it doesn't satisfy your wishes. I
hope that the statement in the key improves transparency though. (I'll
happily reword this is anyone thinks it could be improved)

All the best,

Charles

(it's not that I don't want to discuss this issue on the mailing list... but
if anyone wanted to try and persuade me that all advertising was bad from an
ethical point of view or something then I wouldn't consider that relevant to
Mycroft and as such the Mycroft mailing list and would prefer it if they
mailed me rather than the list)