Anyway, I ran across a site which looked pretty good. In fact, it was very nice, good graphics, excellent content, nice layout and good navigation. In other words, at first glance it looked like a good candidate for an award.

The only way to be able to judge sites in a high-volume awards program such as ours (usually 40 or so entries a week) is to ensure that time is well spent. This means when I view a contender for an award first 60 seconds of viewing is used to quickly reject or accept a site. This whittles down contenders greatly so that my time can be spent on those web sites that deserve a closer look.

So anyway, I was surfing web and found a site which looked pretty good. Very good, in fact. Lots of nice graphics, very well-done layout, HTML code looked good and content was first rate. I continued looking and comparing and came to conclusion that I had a real winner here, a site which was worthy of excellent site award.

I hesitated as I started to give out award, though. Something didn't seem right, something was wrong. I continued looking, and before long realized I had found a para-site.

If you were worried about Microsoft's smart tags, then perhaps you should read this article. Whereas you could argue that Microsoft didn't have best of intentions with smart tags, at least they provided a way for webmasters to prevent them showing on their pages.

On other hand, Ezula (and it's product TopText) is scum that scum wipes off scums feet. The company is evil. While they are not in same league as Osama Bin Laden (who needs to be volunteered to a special project to determine effects of nuclear missles on human flesh), they are evil. With them, though, best "nuke" is to ignore their pitch and never install product. If you've got it, remove it immediately. It's simple and and obvious.

Here's what Ezula does. They sell users on some exaggerated benefit (much like that other scum product called Gator) and use this to get their product installed on user's computer. In this case, Ezula "gives" their users something almost identical to smart tags.

The product basically scans HTML pages as they are loaded onto a system, looking for keywords. When it finds a keyword, it replaces it with a special link to page (or pages) of a page advertiser (along with some links to content of some kind - that's "benefit" that gets people to install silly product).

Let's take an example. Pretend you want to sell tires, so you purchase Ezula rights to keyword "tires". Now, every time any web page of any Ezula user loads it is scanned for word "tires". Ezula replaces those with links to your site - even if it is site of one of your competitors! Or even a site about how people get tired ("he tires easily") or anything like that.

Here's what they tell users (the poor suckers who download this excrement): "eZula, Inc. is a leading provider of real-time contextual Internet solutions. eZula's flagship product TopText iLookup is premier personal Internet reference and simplification tool, empowering millions of Internet users with an easy way to retrieve relevant information and simplify Internet Navigation."

Sound's great, doesn't it? Man, if that's all you read you'd run to download this garbage. But wait, read more of website. Go to advertisers section and you will read, "eZula's platform leverages content that user is viewing in real time and turns key phrases, that best describe advertiser, into a global advertising opportunity that drives qualified traffic to advertiser from anywhere on Web."