Give Us A Break Here(adword advertising)

[ViRGE]

To whomever is in charge of advertising for AnandTech, can we get a break here? I just checked out the May price guide, and certain words are being turned in to adwords(for a lack of a better term), becomming orange and linked to different advertisers pages("manufacturing" links to this, performance to this, etc). These adwords are intrusive, and just by poking around, none of them seem remotely related to the geek audience(who here buys expensive Sun servers?). This is the kind of stuff spyware makers have been getting nailed for in the past, so it's quite dissapointing to see a major website like this resorting to such a vile tactic. We're intelligent people here, is it possible we can get treated like it?

PS Before anyone thinks I'm off my rocker, I just finished running SpyBot and AdAware, thinking I had spyware; both came up clean, so it's definately the site's handywork

PS2 A picture of an adword'd article

PS3 Just read the source code of the page in question; it doesn't even have the link in it. Perhaps whatever triggers this is a program/script embedded in to an ad?

 

[Ryan]

Yea, I see them too. I say: whatever you have to do to pay the bills, do it 🙂

 

[narzy]

using opera 7.11 I don't see shizzienit...🙂

 

[SinfulWeeper]

Same with Mozilla 1.31 🙂

 

[Lord Evermore]

Eww, I just disabled proxomitron and it does do that. Then I went through the code and found what I believe to be the javascript that does it. It is an ad system. I won't point it out and get the thread locked, but it's at the bottom.

I think it'd be fine if it wasn't making links out of what appear to be random words. But also, as with all systems like this, having it make a link out of every instance of certain words can be a bit overbearing. Seeing the word "Intel" hyperlinked 7 times in a single paragraph, or "DDR" or anything else that's mentioned quite often. It does make reading the content difficult, and certainly doesn't make me want to click links.