It was last week, on the 14th, that Ben Edelman showed that C-NetMedia (not to be confused with CNET) was using highly deceptive advertising to lure people to its sites.
It’s still going on, despite press on the matter.
This morning, a search for SpyBot again shows C-NetMedia trying to trick people into thinking their site (spywarebot.com) is Spybot’s:
It’s just as bad on Yahoo, which skews toward a demographic that is arguably not as computer savvy as Google’s (providing a potentially better opportunity for deception).
And a search for Ad-Aware still has their ad for adwarealert.com. HIGHLY deceptive.
(And we all know that many people will click on the first result, not fully understanding that it’s a sponsored link.)
Then, look what these crooks are doing with Microsoft Antispyware (antispyware.com):
And that site, incidentally, sure looks like Microsoft’s site, as Ben Edelman pointed out:
(Image credit: Ben Edelman)
I’m sure there’s more, this is all I have time for right now.
I’m afraid it’s going to take the FTC to handle this one. Apparently the search engines aren’t self-policing on this one.
Alex Eckelberry