Eventhough it claims to help you detect and remove spyware, the Yahoo! Toolbar – now included/suggested in lots of freeware downloads (Flash,)- practically behaves as a piece of adware itself.
I subscribed to a Yahoo Group (for Flickr users in Brussels) and the first time I wanted to access the group’s homepage, I got an ActiveX popup for the Yahoo toolbar. I know I don’t need the toolbar to see the homepage, but I guess a lot of people will think they do, and click ‘Yes’ automatically. I installed it too to see how aggressive the toolbar would be afterwards.
The toolbar shuts down all your IE windows after installation, and a new window appears with the new toolbar. It features spyware protection (with Norton security), multiple tabs, Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Mail/Messenger integration. It tries to set your homepage and preferred search engine to Yahoo! but I did not allow that. The toolbar takes up quite a bit of screen real estate, with the tabs and all.
Let’s say you’re like me, and you’re not that impressed with the toolbar (I use Google’s toolbar and am quite happy with it). You would start with disabling the Yahoo! toolbar (View -> Toolbars). Much to your surprise, the next IE window you open, the toolbar would reappear. Even when you open a link in a new window: there’s the toolbar. Now that’s pretty annoying.
The best way to go is to remove it completely:
Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs -> Yahoo! Toolbar for IE
I’m not saying that Yahoo! is evil, but the way their toolbar is promoted and the way it keeps popping up even when you don’t want it to, reminds me a lot of ’shopping toolbars’ and other malware. Certainly if they want to promote it as a tool to combat spyware and adware, they might do some effort to behave correctly too.
Published on
October 3, 2006 in
Google.
Last week, CNET’s Elinor Mills reported on how a web search for “Martin Luther King” returns, as its first result on Google and as its second result on Windows Live Search, a web site (martinlutherking dot org) operated by a white supremacist organization named Stormfront.
(…)
What’s remarkable, though, is not that a search algorithm might be gamed by extremists but that the owners of the algorithm might themselves defend the offensive result – and reject any attempt to override it as an assault on the “integrity” of their system.
via Nicholas Carr
How were they (i.e. Stormfront) able to reach #1 with only 372 backlinks and a Pagerank 6? Any SEO tricks being used there?
Anyway, the best thing we can do is to push Google and the other search engines in the right direction: link Martin Luther King’s name to another site that is a better start point to learn about the man. Let’s take his Wikipedia page.
If you want to have an idea about who MLK was: check the following page:
Martin Luther King
Feel free to add your push, let’s see how long it takes before the Google results have been corrected.
UPDATE: Scoble added some more links:
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Published on
October 2, 2006 in
movie.
One wonders if, next to the departments Marketing and Human Resources, there are a number of offices marked “Industrial espionage” in the studios of Pixar, Dreamworks and other animation houses. It could be a coincidence, but they seem to do the same kind of movies at the same time:
Ants: A bug’s life (Pixar – 1998) | Antz (Dreamworks – 1998)
Monsters: Monsters Inc (Pixar – 2001) | Shrek (Dreamworks – 2001)
Oceans: Nemo (Pixar – 2003) | Shark’s tale (Dreamworks – 2004)
Wild animals: Madagascar (Dreamworks – 2005) | The Wild (Disney – 2006)
Hyperactive nut-focused squirl-ish creature:
Ice Age II (Blue Sky – 2006)
Over the hedge (Dreamworks – 2006)
Continue reading ‘Pixar, Dreamworks … : synchronized imagination’
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