7search and spyware

coolwebsearch and 180solutions

[Catwoman]

This is my first post here. I did a search on this subject and ended up here. The thread was more than a year old so I decided to start a new one to bring more current information.

Recently, I got searches from 7Search that came from CoolWebSearch. I was appalled to say the least. Yes like many, I was once highjacked by this program. NOT FUN!

I sent an email to 7Search expressing my displeasure. They wrote back that CWS provided high quality traffic to their advertisers. Sorry, I don't buy it, I wasn't born yesterday. They offered to remove my ads from CWS searches and I gladly took them up on that offer. Whether they did or not, I can't really tell, I have many "no referrer" in my stats, but no more CWS directly.

Today, I had searches from Zango coming from 7Search, a 180Solutions product. Oh great! Another email to 7Search.

In the old thread that brought me here, someone from 7Search had posted. I'm kinda hoping that they will reply to this as well.

Catwoman

[edited by: seth_wilde at 2:31 pm (utc) on June 5, 2006]

[wildbest]

ppc sure is going downhill fast. Greed is getting worse than evil online.

Not all PPC, just second and third grade PPC services like 7search. They are only fraud, fraud, and... fraud again! 100% artificial and/or incentivized traffic! Ads are distributed through XML feeds to fraudster networks generating massive amount of fraudulent clicks. Stay away. Just ask yourself, who on Earth would perform a search on 7search (and the like) if they need to find something on the Web?! My answer is - nobody that is worth advertising to!

[gregbo]

Not all PPC, just second and third grade PPC services like 7search. They are only fraud, fraud, and... fraud again! 100% artificial and/or incentivized traffic! Ads are distributed through XML feeds to fraudster networks generating massive amount of fraudulent clicks. Stay away. Just ask yourself, who on Earth would perform a search on 7search (and the like) if they need to find something on the Web?! My answer is - nobody that is worth advertising to!

Not to excuse the shady practices of some SEs/ad networks, but a lot of the problem with the lower tier services is that hardly anyone has heard of them, so they don't get enough of the "traffic of good intent" to mask the amount of fraudulent traffic that's out there. OTOH, the big engines/networks are well known and promoted, so they get lots of "well-intentioned" traffic -- enough to alleviate the fraudulent traffic they get in some cases.

I tried some searches on 7search and got reasonable results in most cases. Not quite as good as G, but these were nontrivial queries. (They did much better on trivial queries.)

[awardmasters]

We do well with 7search, but there is a high percentage of questionable clicks. We get good results and a good ROI overall, but our area of business does not generally have many really high bid keywords. I believe the higher the bid, the more likely your are to experience fraud.

Also 7search does not provide much traffic in many niches. They are strong on gambling and drugs, but more conventional businesses may find their volume a little low.

Watch any new keywords closely and delete or adjust bids downward on those that you suspect of bad clicks and you can do well with 7search. Beware of their contextual listing options - there can be some real fraud problems there.

[watchthis]

7search wont reply when you point out the obious. They just complain and then Seth Wilde comes and changes your post.

I remember giving my click logs from their partners after challanged to do so. It was edited out.