Yahoo Sued for Spyware, Typosquatting-Based Ads

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."

Full description

[Anonymous Coward]

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

What's going on here?

[Anonymous Coward]

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".)

They have a point!

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Remove the Toolbar!

[eldavojohn]

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!

Re:Would someone sue Adobe?

[fjfish]

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-spyware stuff does seem to stop a lot of this, particularly hijacking the home page with a referer URL.