Les Jones

E-commerce > Beware of Redzee.com

Redzee.com called me about advertising on their site (on behalf of my day job). They're a search engine whose niche is that they filter out pornography. (But ironically redz dot com is a pornography site.) They also have a search toolbar, and offer Web site previews using Alexa.

Now that I've read about them on Webmaster and search engine positioning forums I've decided not to sign up. They apparently do funny things to other search engines' search search results via their toolbar plugin. Webmasters are reporting that the "customers" who come through Redzee hit their home pages and leave, never going any deeper. Cynical people have suggested that the hits are being computer-generated by Redzee themselves.

http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=28580&st=20
http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/thread10063.html

In the course of playing around with Redzee, I found that it sometimes gave strange results. There are two security-related companies called Check Point - Check Point Software Technologies makes network security products, while Checkpoint Systems makes physical anti-theft tags used by retail stores and libraries. The screenshot below shows the two companies in Redzee's search results:

Somehow Redzee is using Check Point Software Technologies' name and stock symbol as a title for the URL of Checkpoint Systems. How they got that mixed up I don't know, but I can't imagine anyone in their right mind using Redzee as their search engine of choice, and I won't be buying any advertising from them.