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Comment by joel_liu | Hacker News Reader

Hi All, This is Joel, developer of awesome screenshot. I am so sorry to add the amazon search result in google search result page without info our users first. It's such a bad decision.

This additional features was designed to scratch our own itch. Because when I search some shopping items in google, I always want to check them in amazon at the same time.

In the spirit of transparency, we should disclose that this feature does bring small amount of revenue to us, which enables us to continue to improve this product.

Since so many users don't like it, we already updated a new version(3.2.1) to remove this feature.

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Good of you to come out and apologise for it (and remove the hidden feature), but this kind of fails the plausible deniability test...

"I mistakenly added a feature that would show our referral links to half a million users in their search results" isn't really believable.

The intension is to make a small mount of money from the referral links while it still helps some users. However, I did it in a wrong way. Maybe we should did it like this: 1) Disable it by default. 2) Ask user's permission to enable it 3) Tell users why we add it.

> Because when I search some shopping items in google, I always want to check them in amazon at the same time.

Seriously? You expect us to believe you maliciously hijacked user's search results and put in your own affiliate links just because you thought it would be "nice"??

>In the spirit of transparency

AKA "Now that we got caught acting against the spirit of transparency..."

>we should disclose that this feature does bring small amount of revenue to us

Yeah, no shit; but someone else already "disclosed" that.

>Since so many users don't like it, we already updated a new version(3.2.1) to remove this feature.

So what? You've demonstrated a lack of respect for the user's trust and privacy. Why should we trust a liar?

>Seriously? You expect us to believe you maliciously hijacked user's search results and put in your own affiliate links just because you thought it would be "nice"??

I just told the intension behind this feature: 1) It's from my need. 2) It can help us make small mount of money. 3) We provide an option to disable it.

I apologize for the bad decision. We should did it like this: 1) Disable it by default. 2) Ask user's permission to enable it 3) Tell users why we add it.

I did it wrong but still respect users. This feature exists only one day and I removed it the new version.

At the very, very least, you could've just marked the results you were adding in as "Awesome-Screenshot added links" or something similar.

Explicitly matching the font, styling, and layout of the google results is a pretty strong effort to disguise them as google's own.

I don't have your extension installed, but if I did I wouldn't have a problem with this (provided I knew about it). I understand you have to make some $$$, and really affiliate links don't hurt me at all/change my price.

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