How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire

Re:How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire by z3t4 on Wednesday December 11, 2019 @03:26AM (#21760599)

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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Re:How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire by powerapple on Wednesday December 11, 2019 @05:24AM (#21761160)

They kind of do. They are a proxy service, so your IP and browsers are hidden I assume. The search results are coming from Bing and Google.

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Re:How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire by computerex on Wednesday December 11, 2019 @05:08AM (#21761085)

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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Re:How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire by stef25 on Wednesday December 11, 2019 @05:27AM (#21761176)

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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Re:How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire by Railsify on Wednesday December 11, 2019 @07:05AM (#21761681)

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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Re:How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire by endsofinvention on Wednesday December 11, 2019 @07:54AM (#21761923)

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

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