I have two Chrome extensions in the store. They're not very popular and are really just features I wanted for my own use. I think I have less than 100 users total.
At least once a week I get emails from people
- offering money to add their "tracking" code
- wanting to purchased the extension outright
What they clearly want is access to my modest install base to push questionable code onto. I certainly am not going for these offers, but I could certainly see someone less financially secure giving in to it, and that scares me a little.
The idea of paid malware insertion in smaller packages is kind of troubling in general. How often just in life in general do we just trust opaque binaries to be clean.
Did you see what the tracking code does? If possible, it'll be useful to get access to this.
How much were they offering?
They're not really targeting particular extension. Most people probably don't want to sell anyway so they would just waste time. They send email to everyone who have extension and then when any developer replies, only then they decide if they even want to buy. I have extension with 50k installs in last 5 years that has always on full access to visited pages (content script) and they offered $2k.
Did they seem personalized or do they just mass-mail every developer they can find? 100 users seem very little to go through the trouble of acquiring an extension and then push bad code.
Did they ever give you an idea of what they are ready to pay?
They seem pretty generic, like spray and pray. I am sure they just scrape all the developers details from the Chrome Store and bug them all.
I don't seem to have saved any of them but I do recall one offering me $6,400 for my extension because there was a small voice in the back of my head whispering "that's a lot of money..."
Most of the ones wanting me to install code offer ongoing payments.
These rogue extensions are "surreptitiously monetizing web searches" - but doesn't Google conspicuously monetize web searches?
So it seems the Google TOS bans competition in search monetization using their "open source" browser. Isn't it odd that an "open source" browser is apparently designed to provide a monopoly on search monetization by the nice people who give it to you for free?
And being 80% or so of all searches: https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-...
It seems like Peter Thiel's claim that google is a search advertising monopoly masquerading as a (competitive, non-monopoly) technology company might be spot on.
> Peter Thiel's claim that google is a search advertising monopoly masquerading as a (competitive, non-monopoly) technology company
That's not a very deep insight, it's been pretty obvious since they bought out DoubleClick in 2007.
At this point in 2024/25, it's obvious to the point of multiple antitrust lawsuits against Google.
If you want a POV on the most recent one involving Doubleclick, listen to the first part of this podcast with Brian Kelley of App Nexus - a competitor to Google ad tech.
I agree, I think it's not a deep insight, but Thiel notes (in his 'zero to one' speech he gave) that Google actively pretends not to be a search advertising monopoly, and instead pretends to be a competitive technology company, in a wide range of technology fields, to "hide" their monopoly.
Thiel is openly advocating monopolies, and says competition is for losers.
I think he's just calling GOOG out for their marketing, and noting their market strategy to deflect attention away from their monopoly.
I, for one, have never heard anyone publicly mention this besides Thiel. Have you?
I'm not sure I buy Thiel's argument becuase plenty of their non-search businesses such as Google Cloud, GSuite, Waymo, and Verily have become pretty successful in their own right, and vertical integration is another form of monopoly that tends to cracked down on.
If I had a monopoly on sugar and traded in silver and healthcare, I would still have a monopoly on sugar.
Check out the big blue box. I think Thiel's point is spot on:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1093781/distribution-of-...
I mean… they’re as much search as Amazon is retail, no?
Doesn’t GCP bring in big bucks?
Not to mention gsuite. If your company don’t use Microsoft office they use gsuite.
The big blue block is search advertising revenue:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1093781/distribution-of-...
the much smaller black box is GCP. Much smaller. much much smaller.
Small info piece: Chrome isn't open source.
Otherwise I agree (even if it means agreeing with Peter Thiel in this case).
99% of its source is open. I wonder what you think of open source applications that make API calls into closed source cloud systems?
Well shiver me timbers, if that isn't a hoot.
Maybe my vernacular is off, "source available" ?
ah "licensed freeware"
Can you quote the relevant section of the TOS?
I cannot. I am simply paraphrasing the leading sentence:
"The people overseeing the security of Google’s Chrome browser explicitly forbid third-party extension developers from trying to manipulate how the browser extensions they submit are presented in the Chrome Web Store. "
I assumed that this explicit prohibition would be a "TOS". I could be wrong. Maybe it's somewhere else or called something else.
> Apparently, some extension authors figured out that the Chrome Web Store search index is shared across all languages
Oh, you mean like google ads and android app ads? Because both think I'm either Chinese or Korean, despite being neither.