It was reported that google will not renew its agreement with babylon, a report that sent babylon stock in the Israeli stock exchange to nose dived 70%. This came about a week after yahoo sent a message to babylon that it is extremely unsatisfied with the way babylon products behave.
Not sure what is babylon? babylon used to be the developer of a translation software which you actually had to pay in order to use. But at some point the people of babylon had discovered that the dark side has much better cookies and more money to offer then in the honest translation software business and they started to use their familiar and mostly love brand name to hijack browsers during their software install, and switch the search engine settings so that searches will go through babylon’s search engine which is just a proxy to google or yahoo search engines.
They made money out of these scheme because google and yahoo pays for each referal to there engines.
Since babylon made money from each search going through them, they made every effort to prevent the user from changing his search engine settings even after babylon was installed. If hijacking browser settings by itself is very annoying,making it so hard to uninstall made babylon be more of a virus developers then a legit software company.
Nothing is new here and one has to wonder why did it take google so much time to do something about it.
will conduit be the next one to be smacked?