GoHip.com

The latest annoyance on the web.

[Graham]

Well, GoHip has certainly come up with a new way of annoying visiters. I'm not sure how it works but everytime you restart your computer your start up page changes to GoHip where it loads your special "hover bar" and sends you to your regular homepage no matter how many times you change your start up page! Thats just one of the problems..the hover bar cannot be closed and it sends out a pop-up advertisement every minute or so. To see what I mean go here [gohip.com]

Also, please don't be tricked by anything on their site that says "enter your email!" I have been flooded by countless emails by there endless aliases, [e-mail] [e-mail] i think it goes up to opt25.com with about 1 hundred advertisers to each opt. I believe I have blocked about 140 or so senders..

Thanks,
Graham Hulburt

[rcjordan]

Yep, check this out from Wired (3/00):

Over the past month, a little-known Internet search engine called GoHip.com has become a hot topic in several newsgroups, discussion boards, and media accounts. But it's not because it went public, got sold, or gave away free prizes. Rather, GoHip has come under fire for distributing an ActiveX control download that automatically modifies several components on a user's PC -- including one that adds a tenacious GoHip signature to every piece of outgoing email.

wired [wired.com]

BTW, Nettaxi backed out the deal to acquire them in December. I'd say that was a good move.

[Air]

Hi Graham,

I have some code that will undo that little bit of trickery by GoHip (for IE only, can't get NN to cooperate). Anyway if you want it e-mail me and I'll send it to you.

[added] as rosanne rosanadana used to say - never mind, I see the post by RC covers it[/added]

[mivox]

That sounds absolutely hideous... I pity the poor novices who get stuck with stuff like that, not knowing where to start trying to remove it.

Every time I'm disappointed by some wingding that doesn't have a Mac compatible version, I hear about something like this and think, "I'm not so 'deprived' after all."

[Graham]

hehe, I feel dumb now :). Thats okay..It's just amazing what people will come up with to anger their visiters..do they actually think someone is going to read the hundreds of spam e-mails? or click on the dozens of advertisements? Or ever visit GoHip.com again?

God, I couldn't imagine doing something like that to my viewers..

Thank you,
Graham Hurlburt

[gmiller]

Sanford "Spamford" Wallace has been experimenting with an a tricky little thing that changes your IE homepage to a redirect on their site. You still go to the same page you always did, but the redirect allows Spamford's company to track your IE usage.

What he plans to do with that, I don't know.

[rcjordan]

No reason to feel dumb, we just happen to patrol alot of territory here. Truthfully, GoHip didn't register on my radarscreen at first, it's not what anyone (except GoHip) would call prime.

As for raping your visitors, tonight I ran across a new technique while scouting for affiliate merchants. When I entered the merchant site it spawned a pop-up and -for lack of a better term- a task bar resident. I killed the pop-up, but couldn't easily make the task bar resident open into the active window. I figured it was some sort of time bomb. Sure enough, in about a minute it tossed out another pop-up. I had to right-click to kill the task bar resident, there was absolutely no way I could find to get it to open.

Oh, I decided against putting that merchant's code on my site.

[henki]

Funny thing is that GoHip was my choice for meta search a couple of years ago. They had the best script; fast, clean, opt out, etc.

Then about a year ago they got a lot of heat when they installed something similar to what they have now. It was a script that made Gohip your start page just by visiting the site.

That script was taken away after a lot of bad press.
Then they pulled out many of the leading SEs and their search was not that good anymore.

And now they are back doing the same stupid stunt from last year. I think it is a real shame that they did not capitalize on the good search they once provided, instead of cheating visitors to give them page views.