It’s funny to find a product that you worked on mentioned in HN and being called an asshole by implication. :) Around 2003(?) I worked for a search company tha

It’s funny to find a product that you worked on mentioned in HN and being called an asshole by implication. :) Around 2003(?) I worked for a search company that published that Dogpile toolbar. This was before browsers were doing web search from the url bar and when pop-ups were a big problem. The Dogpile toolbar was intended to bring web search to the browser and to also help cut pop-ups. It also include a news ticker fed by various RSS feeds from news sites. Strangely, the pop-up blocker would bark when it blocked a pop-up. Fortunately you could turn that off and I’m sure most users did right away. It was not bundled with other software, did not install other software or change browser settings, and was not installed secretly. There was a menu option in the toolbar to uninstall it which removed everything. It didn’t spy on user activity or report anything back to the mothership. I can’t speak to the intent of the publishers of some of those other toolbars, but the Dogpile one was an honest attempt to produce a useful app and to promote our search site. After the toolbar market became tainted by underhanded techniques we pulled the product, not wanting to be associated with that kind of behavior.