Is Ask Jeeves Behind Browser Hijackers?

AJ Pushing Nasty Pests onto your Desktop? Geez... I mean, Jeeves!
Ask Jeeves last year acquired a company called myway and mywebsearch. Their toolbar products are referred to by many as spyware. In fact, if you search on Google for MywebSearch, most of the results are websites telling you how to remove the mywebsearch toolbar.

Is Ask Jeeves Aggressively Pushing Viagra Advertising?
What brought this to my attention was that a colleague said he found what appeared to him as log spam. When he clicked on the referral string it took him to a fully branded MyWay website with tacky adboxes advertising Viagra, sexual health products, dieting products, etc.

What is log spam?
Log spam is when a referral is left on a server log indicating that a visitor came from a specific website to your website. People have devised ways to fake a referral and leave it on thousands of websites across the internet. The idea is that many log statistics are available online and can be viewed by the public, and more importantly, by the Search Engines.

What this means is that these referrals that are out in the wild can serve as inbound links to websites that are log spamming. An email from the My Way Customer service team states "It may be that your log has recorded multiple users who have our toolbar installed."

Can you make sense of that?

Does Ask Jeeves Profit from Annoying Pest Products?
Well, the answer depends on how you define the word pest. In addition to the MyWay and MyWebSearch products, Ask Jeeves is also profiting from the Smiley Central and Cursor Mania products. According to the PC Hell website, these products are identified as pests by the AdAware and SpyBot Search & Destroy anti-spyware products and are reported to be removed, along with browser hijackers and known spyware programs. If you read the removal instructions on the PC Hell website it will become very clear that they are extremely difficult to get rid of.

Smiley Central can be downloaded from Download.com, but if you read the user reviews, it shows that 94% of Cnet Users have given the Smiley Central program a thumbsdown. A recent review stated,

"Downloaded Smiley Centeral and it hijacked my Google search engine, poisioned my network printer... and I can't remove it! DONT DownLoad This Program!!!! Worse than Bad, terrible!!!"

You can view the complete list of what some people regard as annoying products at Ask Jeeves' website.