• by May 18, 2004

A doctoral candidate at Harvard is creating a furor for WhenU, and by extension, the adware business.

Or, is it merely a tempest in a teapot?

A news story in today's MediaDailyNews indicates that Ben Edelman has been a very busy boy. He's busy conducting research on providers of spyware, according to his definition of spyware, and "cloaking," or the practice of fixing natural search results in order to redirect consumers to altered Web pages that present WhenU and similar companies, in a more favorable light.

Edelman's research helped spur decisions by Google and Yahoo! to remove WhenU from their search indexes. But is the removal temporary? Neither Google or Yahoo! is talking. It's also possible that both companies have already removed smaller, lesser known providers.

Edelman, according to reporter Ross Fadner who has spoken with him at length, is fixated on the spyware issue--what constitutes spyware, how providers disclose their practices and policies, and how companies are engaging in shady practices that have spurred widespread disaffection among consumers.

Edelman cites Eudora as an example of a legitimate adware provider; Google, via its Google Toolbar, he says, offers clear, easy-to-understand disclosure practices. He maintains that WhenU has violated its own disclosure policy.

Google has posted clear policies on its Web site. For example, Google's definition of "cloaking:"

"The term "cloaking" is used to describe a website that returns altered webpages to search engines crawling the site. In other words, the webserver is programmed to return different content to Google than it returns to regular users, usually in an attempt to distort search engine rankings. This can mislead users about what they'll find when they click on a search result. To preserve the accuracy and quality of our search results, Google may permanently ban from our index any sites or site authors that engage in cloaking to distort their search rankings."

It is probably a fair assumption that no advertiser or online publisher wants to be identified with such practices or with the term "spyware."

Reports like Edelman's are likely to put pressure on adware providers to clarify disclosure policies, and weed out providers that need to do a better job.