
How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire - endsofinvention
https://medium.com/against-surveillance-capitalism/how-a-chinese-company-built-a-250-million-search-hijacking-empire-35f957566852
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bartkappenburg
On a side note: when I accidentally viewed the Medium article in landscape
mode the reference links at the bottom got a strikethrough...

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whoanow
I used to work for a company that did desktop search hijacking. Looking back I
can't believe how normalized it was internally.

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seapunk
I can't read this article.

 _Error 410 This account is under investigation or was found in violation of
the Medium Rules._

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hamhand
My old comment still applies.

>After seeing all those sketchy or even fraudulent mobile ads by TikTok's
parent company ByteDance, I won't be surprised if that SMS is a bait.

>But pretty much everybody does it in China, Baidu etc, like "You phone has
8GB of garbage, download us to clean it", "Download us to boost your signal by
4 times immediately", "This cutie just sent you a message, download us to
repsond", basically anything to make you download their apps, and only
political problems go punished.

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balls187
There is something poetic about Google allowing a Chrome extension to hijack
search queries.

I'm loathed to install things like Grammerly, or Honey precisely because of
fears like this.

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rodneyzeng
I can open the link right now.

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Koremat6666
American companies built a billion dollar industries based on this : Ask
Toolbars, Babylon and Yahoo.

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wsgolfer
Cached link to the medium post.

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qwZu8OV...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qwZu8OV6ZtsJ:https://medium.com/against-
surveillance-capitalism/how-a-chinese-company-built-a-250-million-search-
hijacking-empire-35f957566852&strip=1)

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powerapple
so many silent business ideas. It is a win-win situation. Customers want to
hide themselves behind proxy, and the company make good money from big
players. Very smart!

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point78
It's not legal whatv theyre doing.

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powerapple
I am not sure. It really depends on all small prints when you install their
extensions I guess. All these extensions ask for permissions to work. It is
very likely to be legal in my opinion.

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michaelbuckbee
DDG uses Bing results (+ some tweaking) for their search results.

Per their description here: [https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/company/ad...](https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/company/advertising-and-affiliates/)

They use Yahoo ad search syndication to put their own ads against them.

They also insert their own affiliate links onto results.

How is that materially different than what's happening here? That this company
presumably doesn't have a backend search API agreement with Bing?

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chrissnell
The user is intending to search with Google but the query never touches Google
or shows any Google results. That's why it's different.

Thanks for the DDG link, though. I had no idea.

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jmull3n
Is there anything actually illegal about this? What laws are broken?

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C1sc0cat
The Computer misuse act(UK) GPDR (EU) are just two

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tendencydriven
We have no idea what data they're actually storing, and everything the
extensions does is stated in the description of the extension, I'm not a
lawyer but I don't think the Computer Misuse Act is being broken here. We have
no idea on the data they store so who knows if GDPR is.

But there's also the fact that they are not a EU or UK company, they are
Chinese. Where the laws are far more relaxed about things like this.

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domador
Hmm... I'm unable to access and read this article. Medium displays a 410 error
and an ominous message: "This account is under investigation or was found in
violation of the Medium Rules." Given the subject matter, I'm starting to get
a little suspicious about why this article was taken down.

~~~
robtherobber
Maybe try
[https://web.archive.org/web/20191211012207/https://medium.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191211012207/https://medium.com/against-
surveillance-capitalism/how-a-chinese-company-built-a-250-million-search-
hijacking-empire-35f957566852)

~~~
endsofinvention
Update: Medium has restored the article. The Chinese troll army failed to
suppress the news for long.

Please see a screenshot of the full article here:

[https://imgur.com/a/uJxate0](https://imgur.com/a/uJxate0)

For the data table, go here:

[https://airtable.com/shrtyVQQG1DhaXIxx](https://airtable.com/shrtyVQQG1DhaXIxx)

It looks like this company is trying very hard to suppress this news. A media
blackout might work in China, but not in America.

I am in contact with Medium to get the article restored. If anyone has a
Medium contact, any help would be appreciated.

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erikrothoff
So 7 million users equals a revenue of $250 million. Meaning 1 user is worth
$35 on an annual basis. That’s insane! No wonder Google is so huge.

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hamhand
Google doesn't push their shopping affiliate links as agressively.

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omeid2
Maybe not exactly in those terms, but effectively every Google ad is logically
the same and even more lucrative, as google gets paid for _potential_
purchases unlike affiliate links which only pays for actual purchases.

And if you think Google is not aggressive, search "credit card" without ad
block. It is insane!

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jryle70
Credit card is such a commercial term that it's bound to have a lot of
bidding. I tried to search for "Campobello", the Canadian island bordering
Maine, the other day, and was amazed that there were no ads at all. There
still aren't. DDG on the other hands shows me three ads, two on top and one at
the bottom. Make that as you will.

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ga-vu
Title says "how" but it doesn't explain anything.

It just lists that they run two malicious Chrome extensions.

Talk about clickbait.

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danso
> _Genimous Technology Co Ltd, a public company traded on the Shenzhen Stock
> Exchange under the symbol 000676, is the 12 billion CNY ($1.7 billion USD)
> company that is behind these extensions [1]. Their ownership is concealed
> through shell companies setup in offshore jurisdictions like Polarity
> Technologies Ltd in Cyprus and EightPoint Technologies Ltd in the Cayman
> Islands, but can be traced through analysis of the browser extensions terms
> of service and contact information [2, 3]. Based on public filings, in the
> first 6 months of 2019, Genimous made 900,296,410.76 CNY ($125 million USD)
> from its overseas division, which generates its revenues from ads on search
> results pages [4, 5 (page 15 of the PDF)] for a $250 million yearly run
> rate._

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ga-vu
That's just a description of the company, probably copy-pasted from some stock
market site.

When someone says "how they built an empire" I expect to read their history
and modus operandi.

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danso
I don't think stock market blurbs have this:

> _Their ownership is concealed through shell companies setup in offshore
> jurisdictions like Polarity Technologies Ltd in Cyprus and EightPoint
> Technologies Ltd in the Cayman Islands, but can be traced through analysis
> of the browser extensions terms of service and contact information_

In any case, it's a blog post summarizing ongoing reporting and developments
of a new company that ostensibly operates below the radar. It seems obvious
that it won't contain the kind of indepth, historical content that a book
offers.

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Gustomaximus
> Genimous Technology Co Ltd, a public company traded on the Shenzhen Stock
> Exchange under the symbol 000676, is the 12 billion CNY ($1.7 billion USD)
> company that is behind these extensions

If you're brave, short this. Shining a light on an edge of ethical/legal
business has a good chance of making their revenue dry up fast.

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fasteo
>>> Shining a light on an edge of ethical/legal business has a good chance of
making their revenue dry up fast.

Any previous case ? Having a hard time believing that a stock is driven by
ethical issues

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adventured
> Any previous case ? Having a hard time believing that a stock is driven by
> ethical issues

There are plenty of examples.

See the recent case of Papa John's. The stock imploded by 50% over a few
months in an ethical scandal related to the founder (John Schnatter) saying
the N word among other things.

Schnatter had criticized the NFL's handling of the kneeling protests that went
on in relation to Colin Kaepernick, saying that it had hurt Papa John's
business (they were a prominent sponsor of the NFL). Schnatter took a lot of
flack for that criticism.

On a call with Papa John's marketing firm, he said this:

> "Colonel Sanders called blacks n-----s," he said, complaining that Sanders
> had never received backlash, according to Forbes.

> Forbes also reported that Schnatter recalled growing up in Indiana, where he
> said people used to drag black people from their trucks until they died.
> Forbes reported that Schnatter's comments were intended to demonstrate his
> stance against racism, but that people on the call were offended by them.

Schnatter as the founder, and largest shareholder, was forced out of the
company. Papa John's sales dropped for the first time in 14 years and they
slid into losing money after being consistently profitable throughout their
history.

Papa John's was tied up with the NFL in a marketing arrangement, that involved
them being the official pizza company sponsor for the league. That arrangement
was ended in the months following all of this. Papa John's same store sales
promptly nose dived as their public perception was tarnished (they tried
numerous promotions to prop that up and it all failed).

In total they lost about 15% of their sales. The company removed several
executives and has been working to stop the decline plus repair their brand
(they brought in Shaq in a prominent way as one example, he has sparred with
Schnatter a few times verbally and Schnatter continues to run his mouth about
the situation publicly).

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blackearl
Those are very public, very USA-centric examples. Some shady company on the
Chinese market? I'm more inclined to doubt anything will happen unless Chrome
bans their extensions.

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jfoster
This doesn't feel completely clear cut. Users installed the add-on expecting
their search to change. It changes their search. Presumably it's at least
preventing Google & Bing from then knowing who made the search. Whether it's
truly anonymous seems a bit of a stretch. (how do they define it?)

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endsofinvention
These extensions do not simply change the default search in the browser. They
actively hijack searches on the Google and Bing homepages. Test it yourself in
a sandbox.

A user who literally types in Google.com or Bing.com into their browser
address bar intends to conduct a search using Google or Bing. Their intention
is very clear. It is not to have their search hijacked and taken to a
"private" search engine.

They also use Bing to power their search results and ads so Microsoft is still
able to collect the user's data.

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dumbfounder
It's still sort of doing what the extension says it is going to do. On the
extension page it says

"Keep your searches private by redirecting searches that may be tracked to
Search Encrypt, a privacy-focused search engine... For your privacy, Search
Encrypt intercepts the requests if it's on our list of sites"

So it says it hijacks right in the description.

On their website for their "search engine" it says

"The Search Encrypt encrypts your search terms between your computer and
searchencrypt.com. Search Encrypt is supported by sponsored ads featured on
our search results page."

Which obviously (to you and me anyways, not to others) is also done at Google
so there is no actual benefit other than Google doesn't get your data.

My conclusion is that, yes, they are scummy and taking advantage of fears of
people to make a buck. But is it an outright scam? Not so clear.

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fnord77
your searches are not private though, since one they're decrypted on
searchencrypt.com, they're logged as per chinese government reporting laws.

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dumbfounder
Private is a BS term, can mean just about anything. If it's private from the
US gov but not China, that might be "private" enough for some, obviously not
for others. But it's also nowhere near certain your assumption is true.

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soup10
When Google pays Apple $10B a year to be the default search engine on iOS it's
"business".

But when a no-name Chinese company redirects searches to Bing suddenly its
"fraud" and "search hijacking" and a "national security threat".

All this really shows is the ridiculous amount of revenue search has that such
a simple scheme is making 100M+

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RHSeeger
Yes? They're completely different scenarios. One is setting the default search
engine, the other is actively subverting the user's intention.

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chrischen
The user’s intention is to proxy the search results so it is anonymized. Based
on their chrome extension description it seems to do that. It works not unlike
duckduckgo.

Spinning it as some Anti-Chinese national security thing is probably
unnecessary.

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z3t4
I don't think they anonymize the search, they just send it directly to Bing or
Google. Anonymizing the search wouldn't earn them any money.

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computerex
How does it earn them any money to begin with? I know the article claimed they
have a revenue of $250 million a year, but unless they are somehow injecting
their own ads, how does a simple redirection result in any revenue for them?

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stef25
They do inject their own ads

> [...] a search for “airpods” on Bing leads to a Search Encrypt search
> results page that has more ads than search results. A user would have to
> have the stamina to scroll through 10 text ads from Microsoft and then 5
> image ads before coming to an organic search result

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Railsify
So is there an ad bidding system and marketplace they run with a separate user
interface that requires ad buyers to login and purchase ads?

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endsofinvention
They use Bing for their search results and ads. Microsoft does all the work to
onboard advertisers.

