Rogers Intercepts Personal Searches to Own Service

“Ugh” is about all I can say lately whenever thinking of Rogers, a company that loves pushing their customers’ buttons, because it’s fun, and profitable. After all, there’s a blatant lack of competition up here, so they could easily pull off any stunt they want. Who’s going to choose to go without their cable, Internet, cell phone and possible home phone? Exactly.

We all know about the iPhone plans, which still suck, but is old news. Last night, I found another reason to dislike the company… because they are now intercepting searches. Personally, I never touch the actual ‘Search’ box in Firefox, but rather just use the address bar. Since I try to stay away from Google as much as possible, I have it routed through to Live.com. When I used it last night though, I wound up with an image like the one below.

Ugh. So not only is Rogers taking it upon themselves to inject a message into your browser whenever you are close to hitting your monthly bandwidth quota (it can be argued how much of a problem this is), they are now overtaking your search in order to earn themselves even more cold hard cash. This is truly incredible, but not at all surprising.

This didn’t work on my families PC’s, who do use Google for their searches, so I’m not exactly sure how it works, or who would experience this ‘takeover’. Sure, you can disable this feature, but it’s stored via cookie, meaning once cookies are cleared, this ridiculous ‘feature’ is restored. The worst of it is that when I chose to disable it, using the address bar for searches would land me at the Rogers site again, but with a page error. Ugh. Canada needs a new fierce competitor (well, one to begin with), and soon.