259717 - kurona-20 affiliate code added to amazon search requests

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Search, defect)

Description

[Luke Matkins]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10

Hi, I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, but it looks like the amazon
search box is adding someone's affiliate code to all its queries (giving that
someone a commission of something like 5% on the resulting amazon sales).

In the src tarball that I downloaded, the tag is added by the file
mozilla/browser/locales/en-US/searchplugins/amazondotcom.src.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Select Amazon from the search box dropdown
2. Type in a search (say "test"), hit enter
3. Watch the affiliate code appear in the results url

Actual Results:  
I am directed to
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/external-search/104-6997690-0573536?field-keywords=test&mode=blended&tag=kurona-20&sourceid=Mozilla-search
which contains the offending affiliate code

Expected Results:  
Not added an affiliate tag

Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

Confirmed.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040915 Firefox/0.10

Comment 2

[Rafael Ebron (:rebron)]

That is indeed Mozilla.org's affiliate code.  Shouldn't impact performance in
any way and as mentiond in another bug, Amazon is on the top 10 list of Mycroft
downloads. So just another way to keep the Foundation lights turned on.  We can
revisit if people don't feel that Amazon is useful in the search bar (and we'll
know that with preview release.)

Comment 3

[Pierre Chanial]

marking it invalid but thanks for being vigilant!

Comment 4

[bart decrem, not checking bugmail]

actually, can we change that to:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/mozilla-20
 

Comment 5

[Rafael Ebron (:rebron)]

Attachment: New Amazon Sherlock Plug-in

New plug-in w/ correct affiliate tag.

Comment 6

[chris hofmann]

ben, can you check this in?

Comment 7

[Greg Campbell]

It might be worth including a line in the release notes about this. Some people
will notice the affiliate tag "mozilla-20" and get pissed, thinking that Mozilla
is trying to take financial advantage of the browser's popularity.

Comment 8

[Robert Accettura [:raccettura]]

Greg has a good point.

It might also be wise to ad a note to the Donate page?  

"Help Support Mozilla"

When you shop through Amazon.com, search for the product using the search bar. 
Amazon will give up to 5% of the sale to Mozilla.org to continue development. 
This is a no cost way to support the Mozilla Foundation!


It really is an easy way to support the mozilla foundation.  Costs nothing to
the end user.

Comment 9

[Steffen Wilberg]

Fixed on trunk by the aviary landing.