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

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.

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!

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

For the data table, go here:

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.

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.

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.

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.

They are supposedly driving 10% of Bing's search volume... I think Microsoft probably loves them.

> 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).

Check out Cootek - Chinese app developer that went public about a year ago (main app is TouchPal keyboard). They were engaging in "malicious and disruptive behavior" to drive their revenues (Buzzfeed broke the story) and Google banned them from distributing their apps on Google Play. Stock is down from >$9 before the news broke to $5 today.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/google-b...

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ctk/

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.