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No really, they are.

Sorry if I offend anyone with this rant, but be warned, I'm very very annoyed about this.


anyone seen this digg about Yahoo setting affiliate cookies in natural search results?

or the Dugg article Yahoo is dropping affiliate cookies?

So, they are, are they?

Didnt believe it until i did it my own self.

And ya know what? They do! sneaky bast**ds

I looked into this abit more, did abit of testing and you should see the litter they drop on your machine.

Whats more, that article only mentions that one "Orbitz" link

All Yahoo 'natural' search redirection goes through rds.yahoo.com. At the end of the URL string you can see where rds.yahoo.com redirects you too. It's supposed to be the URL of the result.

View the source of this page (mentioned in the article):
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=cheap+ … p;fp_ip=UK

copy it all to an editor, strip out everything except the search results and you'll see the extent of Yahoo's treachery.

I count 16 links that redirect through rdre1.yahoo.com.

Every result with a "Quick Links" in the description has an affiliate redirect link for the result title and the same for the quick links

that's 4 out of 10 results.

28 links in 10 "natural" results (inc cache), 18 of which are affiliate links.
that's more than 60% of the links.

cheeky feckers

No cache or filesize in those results BTW.

and the worst of it is, those 4 results, all set the same damn cookies: fastclick cookies, and cookies for (get this) all the other sneaky results.

So if you click just one of those lies, you'll get cookies set for all 4 lies.

Oh and bugger me, you should see the popunders!

Do they expect us to believe that they won't be manipulating their results to ensure 1st page for these links?

Natural search results My A*se.

Imagine what the world would be like, if every search engine did this, if every result that had a potential sale had a cookie set by the greedy feckers.

Imagine Google and MSN setting cookies (we know Yahoo already do)
That's what? 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of the worlds search traffic?

so where do our sales come from?

Where would we be?

eh?

I'd be out of a job, I know that for a start.

And, it appears they've only just got caught. How long have they been doing this?
How many cookies have been set?
How many of MY sales have Yahoo stolen?

F**k Yahoo, and the horse they rode in on!

Digg that digg