Cached link to the medium post.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qwZu8OV...
How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire
51–60 of 62 posts
Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>> Shining a light on an edge of ethical/legal business has a good chance of making their revenue dry up fast. Any previous case ? Having a hard time believing that a stock is driven by ethical issues
> Any previous case ? Having a hard time believing that a stock is driven by ethical issues There are plenty of examples. See the recent case of Papa John's. The stock imploded by 50% over a few months in an ethical scandal related to the founder (John Schnatter) saying the N word among other things. Schnatter had criticized the NFL's handling of the kneeling protests that went on in relation to Colin Kaepernick, say…
Those are very public, very USA-centric examples. Some shady company on the Chinese market? I'm more inclined to doubt anything will happen unless Chrome bans their extensions.
Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire
#53Hmm... I'm unable to access and read this article. Medium displays a 410 error and an ominous message: "This account is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules." Given the subject matter, I'm starting to get a little suspicious about why this article was taken down.
Maybe try https://web.archive.org/web/20191211012207/https://medium.co...
Update: Medium has restored the article. The Chinese troll army failed to suppress the news for long.
Please see a screenshot of the full article here:
For the data table, go here:
https://airtable.com/shrtyVQQG1DhaXIxx
It looks like this company is trying very hard to suppress this news. A media blackout might work in China, but not in America.
I am in contact with Medium to get the article restored. If anyone has a Medium contact, any help would be appreciated.
Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
The user’s intention is to proxy the search results so it is anonymized. Based on their chrome extension description it seems to do that. It works not unlike duckduckgo. Spinning it as some Anti-Chinese national security thing is probably unnecessary.
the searches are logged to a server in China. They're not private
I can’t seem to access the article anymore but I recall it saying their concern was the potential for the privacy policy to be changed at any time. This concern would be true for any company.
Just having servers in China is not really much different from having servers in the US. The NSA probably logs more than it lets on.
Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire
#55DDG uses Bing results (+ some tweaking) for their search results. Per their description here: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/ad... They use Yahoo ad search syndication to put their own ads against them. They also insert their own affiliate links onto results. How is that materially different than what's happening here? That this company presumably doesn't have a backend search API agreement…
Apologies for offtopic, but do all search engines do the affiliate thing? I.e. if I click on a Google link and buy a thing on Amazon, Google gets paid?
Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire
#56I can open the link right now.
Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire
#57My old comment still applies. >After seeing all those sketchy or even fraudulent mobile ads by TikTok's parent company ByteDance, I won't be surprised if that SMS is a bait. >But pretty much everybody does it in China, Baidu etc, like "You phone has 8GB of garbage, download us to clean it", "Download us to boost your signal by 4 times immediately", "This cutie just sent you a message, download us to repsond", basical…
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Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire
#58Hmm... I'm unable to access and read this article. Medium displays a 410 error and an ominous message: "This account is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules." Given the subject matter, I'm starting to get a little suspicious about why this article was taken down.
It's displaying for me fine an hour later.
Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes? They're completely different scenarios. One is setting the default search engine, the other is actively subverting the user's intention.
The user’s intention is to proxy the search results so it is anonymized. Based on their chrome extension description it seems to do that. It works not unlike duckduckgo. Spinning it as some Anti-Chinese national security thing is probably unnecessary.
it is clickbait with contemporary characteristics.
Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Genimous Technology Co Ltd, a public company traded on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange under the symbol 000676, is the 12 billion CNY ($1.7 billion USD) company that is behind these extensions [1]. Their ownership is concealed through shell companies setup in offshore jurisdictions like Polarity Technologies Ltd in Cyprus and EightPoint Technologies Ltd in the Cayman Islands, but can be traced through analysis of the b…
That's just a description of the company, probably copy-pasted from some stock market site. When someone says "how they built an empire" I expect to read their history and modus operandi.
I don't think stock market blurbs have this:
> Their ownership is concealed through shell companies setup in offshore jurisdictions like Polarity Technologies Ltd in Cyprus and EightPoint Technologies Ltd in the Cayman Islands, but can be traced through analysis of the browser extensions terms of service and contact information
In any case, it's a blog post summarizing ongoing reporting and developments of a new company that ostensibly operates below the radar. It seems obvious that it won't contain the kind of indepth, historical content that a book offers.