Salon.com is running a story on a web company named Website Results which sold a service to other large online companies claiming to increase those sites' hits and ranking in search engines. Salon has shed light on this companies fraudulent business practices and spyware they used:
The pitch to Web merchants and other traffic-hungry sites was that Website Results had a secret sauce for getting companies ranked highly by search engines such as AltaVista, Lycos, Webcrawler and the like. Using sleight-of-hand techniques such as "doorway pages" and "cloaking," Website Results was able to trick the search sites into listing clients at the top of search results...
To further pad its billable numbers, the company developed a software program, referred to as "The Zebra Project," that was designed to make it look as if lots of Web surfers had been clicking at search sites on hyperlinks that led to Website Results' customers' sites. Since many clients paid Website Results for delivering traffic on a "cost per click" basis, the automatic program helped to boost its revenue.
