Tuesday, June 11, 2013

AVG Search Powered By Yahoo!

In the early days of both of these brand I really liked them.  After this experience, their good name is no longer good with me.

I installed a free license key recovery tool to recover some Microsoft software license keys before we migrated to another machine.

I realize free should've made me cautious, but a guy at work said he used it and wanted me to use it to get the information we needed.  I don't recalled seeing anything that said it was going to install other software or a check box to make it not do so.

As I started to use my Chrome browser, I notice that my New Tab behavior had changed.  When I would create a new tab window for browsing, it would bring up AVG Search powered by Yahoo.  It usually just brought up the recently accessed pages page, but now that was gone.  I would've expected that if something changed it would have brought up my home page.

I checked my home page settings and it was still set to Google.  I also saw that the setting was set to not show the home page, but the recently used pages.

I looked around the browser and around the settings and found nothing that looked out of the ordinary.

I finally saw someone mention to look in add remove programs.  I thought I had, but perhaps I didn't since the browser did not appear to have an ad-ware toolbar on it.  The browser looked fine.

Nonetheless, I opened Add/Remove Programs and sure enough I found AVG Search powered by Yahoo.  I uninstalled it and the problem went away.

This practice is slimy and marketing trickery.  When I install one program and having it not only install another program, but having that program hook into one of the other programs on my machine is a foul marketing practice.

I stopped using AVG because it became a little bloated and Microsoft came out with their own, but I still had good feelings toward AVG.  Now I feel that AVG is a tainted brand and if I ever see the AVG brand on anything I will be steering clear of it and if I cannot steer clear of it I will be very cautious to not trust it.

I don't use Yahoo for search anymore and haven't for years, but I do use it for stock quote and TV listings.  I also use it if I am trying to test that a computers internet settings are working.  After this experience I will be finding another source for stock quotes and TV listings.

I have talked to marketing people and their seems to be a feeling among some of them that annoying and trying to trap potential customers is good marketing, because they might eventually buy the product if you stay in front of them.

Businesses that behave this way end up being blacklisted by security software, email servers, and sometimes phone systems.

The idea that "no" probably means "yes" or at least a strong "maybe" is unacceptable.