Kelkoo Gripe

Wednesday.

Just who the bloody hell do these Kelkoo guys think they are? I'm publishing this again because they annoyed me so much yesterday.

On Saturday I published the story of a guy, Abe Robsmann, who had his car impounded by the police because their computer said he wasn't insured. He got left in the wilds of Leeds, UK in his football shorts, with no mobile phone and no money, on a lousy, rainy January evening while his car was towed away. He had to go to a local McDonald's and negotiate with them to phone home. The police just said it wasn't their problem.

If you searched for Abe Robsmann, five links appeared on Google to the Abe Robsmann story.

The first three redirected straight to Kelkoo pages, two to a site selling Police Cds and one to a site for booking London hotels via a site that claimed to be about drugs in London.

If you selected Google's cached entries for those pages you found Abe's story, with no indication of where it originated, tagged on the bottom with another two similarly ripped pages presumably providing similar redirects to Kelkoo's pages. What a bunch of creeps!

Google zapped the offending links.

I might only be a hick from Bogsville but I know when I'm being ripped off.

Finally welcome back to T.J.Yungersun who has finally got his computer back online.

Oh and while I remember - Merl will you please stop hammering my computer - I already have enough problems keeping it going, what with power cuts and spikes. 90 hits on the site in two hours are good for the ego but not when they are all from the same MacOS X, running Firefox 1.0 through an Entanet International ISP.