Saturday, August 6, 2011

Not cool: @FrontierCorp hijacked my search query.

Frontier_keyword_hi-jack
I was surprised when I typed Kindle into the Firefox address field, and was taken directly to Amazon.  I just wanted to see Bing search results.  I flipped over to IE9 and tried it again, this time I was shown a splash page by Frontier, my ISP.  I was able to click on the "Learn More" link and then "opt out" of what appears to be sponsered hi-jacking of certain keywords. 

This issue has been written about in recent TechCrunch articles: http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/05/study-some-isps-still-hijacking-search-resul...

Importantly, I was never shown the splash page in Firefox.  I had to use the back button in IE9, copy the link, and paste it into Firefox to view it, and then opt out.  Not sure why Frontier, and other ISP's, think that it's okay to mess with the way I choose to browse the internet, but I guess I should be thankful I could opt out, even though it proved to be difficult.

I should note, that this is my first issue with Frontier, since they took over my ISP account from Verizon, with who I had multiple issues.  I've actually had a pretty good run thus far with Frontier, to be fair.  I just think this practice should be discontinued, as it interferes with a users ability to use their browser and achieve the result they were expecting.

 

 

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