2009-01-02 MyHeritage hijacking homepages

Family Tree Builder

version 3.0

MyHeritage just released version 3.0 of Family Tree Builder (FTB), its desktop genealogy program. If you are using version 2.0, and allow it to check for updates, you’ll see a dialog box offering to download and install it.

I have barely started to evaluate it, so I cannot tell whether version 3.0 is an improvement over 2.0, but I have found that there are two things you should know before installing it.

upgrade only

First of all, if you have version 2.0 installed, be advised that the setup program for 3.0 will offer to perform an upgrade, not allow you to install both versions side by side.
This is not officially supported, but I found that you can keep version 2.0 around by copying it to another directory before upgrading.

Changing your home page just because you installed some desktop application is not recommended. You set it to whatever you like it to be, and corporations should keep their grubby hands of it.

hijacking

The second issue you should be aware of before upgrading is that MyHeritage abuses the Family Tree Builder 3.0 setup program to try and hijack your home page.

You know how browsers setup programs always try to set your home page? Well, MyHeritage has decided that they can use the setup for their program to mess up your browser settings as well.

Family Tree Builder 3.0 Home Page Hijacking

The next dialog has an option labelled Make MyHeritage my home page and it is checked by default. No, sorry, it is worse than that, the actual text is Make MyHeritage my home page (recommended). MyHeritage seems to be abusing the users good faith here by recommending that you allow them to hijack your home page.

Changing your home page just because you installed some desktop application is not recommended. You set it to whatever you like it to be, and corporations should keep their grubby hands of it.

desperate for traffic?

This abuse of good faith to try and hijack your home page makes me wonder just how desperate MyHeritage is for some traffic - and whether they are able to handle it at all.

Last time I tried to use their web site its performance was less than pathetic. MyHeritage should not be tricking users into visiting their website, but improve their website so that those who do visit do not give up in desperation, but are impressed by its performance and features, are happy to use it, come back and perhaps even recommend it to others.

Google CSE

However, this is not about making you visit the MyHeritage site. This is about making you use the MyHeritage Search engine. That is not a search engine for searching myheritage.com, but a MyHeritage-branded search page for searching the web.

The MyHeritage search page appears to be a Google Custom Search Engine. You can tell by the Enhanced by Google logo in front of the edit box.

Anyone can join the Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) program. There are two reasons why you may want to make a custom search engine.

search results

The first reason is that it allows you to restrict results to just your own site, or boost results from a list of sites you deem more important than others.

MyHeritage could be fiddling with your search results. A few quick tests I did do not suggest that they are using this capability. I got the same results from MyHeritage Search as I got from google.us (google.com redirects to the national google.nl site, and those results are slightly different, but that is google’s own doing.). Let’s assume that MyHeritage Search is really just Google search, not changed in any way - then why do they bother doing it?

AdWords

Well, MyHeritage probably does this because of the second reason to create a custom search engine; advertising income. A Google Custom Search Engine displays AdWords along with the search results, just like Google itself. The difference is that you get to keep some of the income those AdWords generate.
All you have to do is join Google’s AdSense program. Once you do so, you can even block competitor’s advertisements from appearing on search results.

According to the MyHeritage press release, more than one million people are using Family Tree Builder. For the sake of argument, let’s say that most of them are trusting, unsuspecting people that just click OK and that soon, exactly one million users will have switched to the MyHeritage Search Engine. Let’s say that MyHeritage will earn an average of just one cent a day from their searches. That would still be € 10.000 each day (€ 3,65 million per year, roughly US$ 5 million per year).

This little bit of arithmetic with round numbers is not about the actual value of tricking users into using your custom search engine. It is just to show that even at small profit values per user per day, it still amounts to a lot of money when you have a lot of users using it all year.

The ability to block advertisements from competing products is a nice bonus.

recommendations

Exercise caution installing Family Tree Builder 3.0. Do not hastily click all the OK buttons, do not trust the defaults, but be sure to uncheck that recommended option.

I advise MyHeritage to try and understand that users do not like this sort of thing. Tactics like these do perhaps result in some short-term gain, but at the cost of long-term damage to your reputation as a trustworthy company.
Show that you are above these tactics. Do not just change the default, but do the right thing: withdraw Family Tree Builder 3.0 immediately and release Family Tree Builder 3.1 without any homepage hijacking code.

updates

updated 2009-01-02 more money talk

MyHeritage recently changed its subscription plans. Users with small databases (less than 1.000 individuals) used to enjoy the Basic plan, which is free. Late last year, MyHeritage changed that from 1.000 individuals to just 500 individuals. The practical upshot of that is that many users who had free Basic accounts would have to upgrade to a paid Premium account to continue to enjoy the same level of service.

Whether pulling a change like that is legal depends on their terms of service, but it is pretty bad PR for sure. I do not think it is smart either, as active users would soon grow their database to exceed 1.000 individuals anyway, but are now prompted to look around for alternatives.