March 2nd, 2005
Weird advertising on 180Search
While researching the pop-up behavior of 180Search, I found that the advertisers paying for exposure are being taken for a ride. 180Search claims to have cleaned up their act, only delivering two or three ads a day (still too many, in my opinion) and performing a clean uninstall. To verify, I installed 180Search’s Zango software. I noticed that the license agreement says it will only deliver two or three ads a day, but also says the number will depend on the user’s online activity. I think 180Search left it open to deliver many more ads to heavy Web users. I surfed around to sites that I thought were likely to cause pop-ups, competitor ads triggered by the site I happened to be visiting. (Because 180Search is watching what Web pages you open, I think the spyware label is appropriate.) The first hit I got was from browsing Amazon.com. Strangely enough, the ad that popped up was Amazon.de, the German version of Amazon. Since I was viewing the English version of Amazon, I’m not likely to be interested in the German version. Obviously 180Search is doing a lousy job servicing its advertisers. Oh, and the uninstall wasn’t so clean, as a Zango installer file was left in the program directory it had created. I wouldn’t be surprised if 180Search could trigger it to reinstall itself.
