How to hide Ryanair | Hacker News Reader

How to hide Ryanair

liveatthewitchtrials.blogspot.com

135 pointscavedave55 comments

Please excuse my ignorance if these guys are now owned by Ryanair, a quick Google suggests they are not, but it looks like Jetbird (an executive jet company) did a straight copy and paste of this for term 2.v.

"(v) You may not establish and/or operate links to this website without the prior written consent of Ryanair. Such consent may be withdrawn at any time at JetBird own discretion."

http://www.flyjetbird.com/en/fns/Terms-of-Use.aspx

I wonder if Ryanair knows one of their competitors are using their T&C's. On the other hand, I wonder if Jetbird know they are listing one of their competitors on their website.

Very amusing to see this! Makes you wonder how many companies Ctrl+C Ctrl+V their T&C's and Privacy Policies from other websites.

You haven't met many lawyers, have you? ;)

Not many no, but the company name of who I'm stealing from would be the first thing I Ctrl+F!

When I hear lawyers and computers being talked about together, the first thing that comes to mind is that they tend to use WordPerfect. So, not only is it not safe to assume any level of computer savvyness, I'm not even sure that ctrl-f would be the right shortcut.

Google should, for giggles, just drop a good number of sites with these terms one day.

Google probably would get the permission to link to Ryanair, though. And Google has to look good in the eye of searchers. They want to find what they are looking for and don't really care about the reasons for some results to be not available.

Google probably assumes that if you are not disallowing their spider via robots.txt you are consenting to allow Google to index your content.

But Google is in a unique position to quickly correct a lot of bad T&C behaviors simply by implying that having those terms may hurt the SEO of offending sites. If SEOs suspected that was part of Google's ranking process then we'd see a lot of bad T&C clauses suddenly dropped.

The phrase "Google is in a unique position to quickly correct a lot of bad [...] behaviors" sends chills down my spine.

Not a bad idea actually, and it'd be even more effective if Google also penalized sites that link to other sites with unreasonable T&C.

The perverse thing about terms forbidding deep linking into a website is that it is so easy to prevent deep linking by technical means. (In fact, it's so easy that even mentioning it seems like a cliche.) On each HTTP request, examine the Referer: header and, if you don't like it, redirect to your homepage. Is there any reason why companies like Ryanair don't just do this?

It's a blacklist, which inherently have their issues. Remember, this is Ryanair, that would mean their steward(esse)s have yet another task to do on their cell phones while supervising the boarding of 3 simultaneous flights.

Actually, it's more like a whitelist - much easier to maintain if they really want to explicitly approve inbound link sites.

Because these companies don't really want to forbid deep-linking, but establish some kind of recourse (regardless of whether it is legally enforceable, or just scary and threatening) against anyone who might offend them in some way.

Because circumventing that filter is even easier than installing the filter in the first place?

Circumventing that filter is easy for the user, but I don't see how it's easy for the referring website.

A referrer is not sent when following a link from a secure website (https) to a non-secure website.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-15.1.3

I would assume that the filter would be implemented to deny/redirect the request if there were no referrer at all.

Thanks for the information. I had not realised that. There are still plenty of other measure that Ryanair could use, of course, in the case where there was no Referer: header, such putting some unique (and constantly changing) id into a cookie such that links from another site wouldn't have the correct id. As other have suggested, perhaps they are perfectly happy with most deep links into their site, just not from certain sites such as price comparison sites. Far be it from me to speculate about such things, of course.

From context, I assumed we were talking about users following deep links. This can be prevented technologically by the target website, and the burden of circumvention is obviously on the user.

Obviously there is no technological way to prevent "deep linking" by the referring website, because that is just creating an <a> tag.

It's not easy for the general ryanair customer. The average person doesn't know what a referrer header is.

I assume that provided I never visit their website I'm not bound by their T&Cs and can therefore link to ryanair.com to my heart's content, right? :)

Funny how the page containing the terms of service for ryanair is titled 'copywrite' :)

A part of me would love to do this - just to teach them a lesson....Maybe I will save it for Dr Evil day!

What lesson are you trying to teach them?

That they should think through the consequences of their terms and conditions.

They do. Its just like signing a lease which indicates "no pets allowed" when everyone and their mother in the building has one, and the landlord knows. Its because if the clause is not in there and your dog is howling all night long they can do nothing. They may want content farms not linking, or perhaps other unknown super secret spy stuff?

It's more like walking into a store that has a tiny book on the floor inside the door that, if you open and read it, tells you that by having already entered the store you've agreed to be prohibited from telling anybody about anything you've seen inside without written consent.

Since this is Ryanair we are talking about... I hope someone actually does this.

How exactly would deoptimizing Ryanair hurt them financially? Do Ryanair customers search Google for anything but "Ryanair" when they want to get to ryanair.com?

well a google of "cheap flight dublin london" Ryanair comes up third. Which implies they must get a fair amount of traffic from search engines

3rd place gets you, what 10% of the people who search for it?

That is a fair point. I would guess it it 10% more of the clicks than 11th place though

Depends what the first 2 results are.

fwiw they are 2nd on duckduckgo for grandparents search, and the first airline.

That can be quite a number, depending on how many actually search for it.

Dear cavedave, this is an official notice to remind you that "You may not establish and/or operate links to this website without the prior written consent of Ryanair" as per the Terms & Conditions. In your blog post, you have linked ryanair.com in the sentence containing:

3. You go to their terms and conditions here and see they do not allow linking to their website

Please kindly unlink or be prepared for further legal action.

I will be sending you an email as well.

Thank you,

EAM Associates

Oh god that is head meltingly genius. Could you post that to the blog? Well played sir

Ryanair have such a well known airline brand that it's unlikely they are relying on organic search results.

A lot of non-tech people don't type any URL, they just type "Ryanair" in Google and click on the first link.

I do that (searching from the address bar) a lot, especially with non-US sites (like Ryanair) where you're not sure if it's .com or .co.uk or what.

True. But even with very few links, I suspect ryanair.com would come up high for a search for "ryanair". They get a bonus for an exact domain match. So no matter what they will probably come up high for searches for "Ryanair"

He's just using Ryanair as a general example. Maybe it wouldn't really hurt them, but it could have an effect on other companies with this dumb policy.

Oh yes. But any business relying on organic search and having an idiotic linking rules deserves to die.

If Google obeyed their T&Cs to the letter and didn’t list them at all that’d hurt them.

Why do companies even have this clause in their T&C? What's the benefit?

I would guess they would use this clause in a trial if someone links to their site with something the dont like, ie: "ryanair kill my dog"

Too many lawyers who want to look useful.

I actually remember my boss telling me to put bullshit clauses in contract drafts so that those people have something to chew at and refrain from messing with the actual matter of the contract.

Reminds me of this:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2349378/new-programming-j...

It was on HN a while back.

This is a well known tactic, and it works. When discussing a list of points in a meeting, the secret is to have a big controversial question come up first (that you don't actually care about): dealing with this first question eats up time, but what's better, it exhausts everyone. Then all the following points are much easier to sell.

Ryanair probably hates airline deal sites.

Probably to stop online 'price compare' or 'find a bargain' website. Ryanair want people to buy via their site so they can upsell.

While we're at it, Dustin Curtis should suggest a site re-design for Ryanair and blog about it to feel the full effect. ;)

A bit off-topic, but I just visited American Airlines site and realized that they have updated it. In reference to http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines.html.

"You may not establish and/or operate links to this website without the prior written consent of Ryanair. Such consent may be withdrawn at any time at Ryanair’s own discretion."

I wonder if Google have got written consent to link to Ryanair from their search results...

Suppose someone is found liable in civil court for deep linking to a website that prohibits it. What kind of damages could the website possibly be entitled to collect? I'm at a loss.

websites that forbid linking to them didn't get the memo on how the web works

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