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Tuesday, March 23, 2004
Overture's Site Match is a Bit Too Revealing
In the spirit of a benevolent hacker searching for flaws in software so the bad guys don't find it first, I report the following.
Yahoo has goofed. Anyone using the new Yahoo Search can easily tell which sites are paying for inclusion and, thus, can drain their accounts dry, if they wish. Too see who has paid for inclusion, simply point your cursor over links in the Yahoo Search results pages, and you'll see a long URL string of alpha-numeric characters. Right there in the middle of the URL string, you'll see text that says "MI=sitematch".
I noticed this while checking on the status of a Site Match account for a client and was appalled to find that anyone can easily tell who's paying for inclusion. Thanks to the dubious cost-per-click fee Yahoo has adopted for each paid inclusion clickthrough, no site is safe from malfeasance by competitors.
Therefore, we at Traffick call upon Yahoo to mask the URLs of pay-for-inclusion sites immediately to avoid abusive click charges from competitors and anyone else wanting to cause mischief.
Posted by
Cory Kleinschmidt
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D'oh!
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