How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire

[hamhand]

My 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", basically anything to make you download their apps, and only political problems go punished.

[jfoster]

This doesn't feel completely clear cut. Users installed the add-on expecting their search to change. It changes their search. Presumably it's at least preventing Google & Bing from then knowing who made the search. Whether it's truly anonymous seems a bit of a stretch. (how do they define it?)

[endsofinvention]

These extensions do not simply change the default search in the browser. They actively hijack searches on the Google and Bing homepages. Test it yourself in a sandbox.

A user who literally types in Google.com or Bing.com into their browser address bar intends to conduct a search using Google or Bing. Their intention is very clear. It is not to have their search hijacked and taken to a "private" search engine.

They also use Bing to power their search results and ads so Microsoft is still able to collect the user's data.

[erikrothoff]

So 7 million users equals a revenue of $250 million. Meaning 1 user is worth $35 on an annual basis. That’s insane! No wonder Google is so huge.

[hamhand]

Google doesn't push their shopping affiliate links as agressively.

[onetimemanytime]

Google has $1x0,000,000,000.00 in revenue and they have no business in China. So it's more than $35 for Google, especially in US, EU, Canada, Australia etc.

[domador]

Hmm... 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.

[ryanmercer]

It's displaying for me fine an hour later.

[alt3red]

I just noticed that as well. You can still read the article by doing a google search and looking at the cached version.

[robtherobber]

Maybe try https://web.archive.org/web/20191211012207/https://medium.co...

[balls187]

There is something poetic about Google allowing a Chrome extension to hijack search queries.

I'm loathed to install things like Grammerly, or Honey precisely because of fears like this.

[ga-vu]

Title says "how" but it doesn't explain anything.

It just lists that they run two malicious Chrome extensions.

Talk about clickbait.

[danso]

> 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 browser extensions terms of service and contact information [2, 3]. Based on public filings, in the first 6 months of 2019, Genimous made 900,296,410.76 CNY ($125 million USD) from its overseas division, which generates its revenues from ads on search results pages [4, 5 (page 15 of the PDF)] for a $250 million yearly run rate.

[GreenMoose]

Was thinking exactly that.

[michaelbuckbee]

DDG 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 with Bing?

[chrissnell]

The user is intending to search with Google but the query never touches Google or shows any Google results. That's why it's different.

Thanks for the DDG link, though. I had no idea.

[yborg]

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?

[whoanow]

I used to work for a company that did desktop search hijacking. Looking back I can't believe how normalized it was internally.

[jmull3n]

Is there anything actually illegal about this? What laws are broken?

[C1sc0cat]

The Computer misuse act(UK) GPDR (EU) are just two

[powerapple]

so many silent business ideas. It is a win-win situation. Customers want to hide themselves behind proxy, and the company make good money from big players. Very smart!

[point78]

It's not legal whatv theyre doing.

[bartkappenburg]

On a side note: when I accidentally viewed the Medium article in landscape mode the reference links at the bottom got a strikethrough...

[seapunk]

I can't read this article.

Error 410 This account is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules.

[Koremat6666]

American companies built a billion dollar industries based on this : Ask Toolbars, Babylon and Yahoo.

[Gustomaximus]

> 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

If you're brave, short this. Shining a light on an edge of ethical/legal business has a good chance of making their revenue dry up fast.

[fasteo]

>>> 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

[donmcronald]

It’s going to be super interesting to see what the reaction to this is (if any). Even though they sound like a terrible company, everyone should take note how easy it is for Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, etc. to make them disappear from existence.

[rodneyzeng]

I can open the link right now.

[wsgolfer]

Cached link to the medium post.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qwZu8OV...

[soup10]

When Google pays Apple $10B a year to be the default search engine on iOS it's "business".

But when a no-name Chinese company redirects searches to Bing suddenly its "fraud" and "search hijacking" and a "national security threat".

All this really shows is the ridiculous amount of revenue search has that such a simple scheme is making 100M+

[RHSeeger]

Yes? They're completely different scenarios. One is setting the default search engine, the other is actively subverting the user's intention.