Today I received an email from Flybuys offering 50 bonus points if I install the flybuys Toolbar, plus a point for every two searches. As a computer consultant I regularly suggest to customer to remove unwanted toolbars. Most toolbars people have installed got there without deliberate intent by the user and once there, they’re not quite sure how to remove them. Some toolbars trick people into installing them.
The main reason toolbar makers want you to install their toolbar is when you search using their toolbar (which often also hijacks the default search engine) is when you click on ads they make money. Often the toolbars don’t display search results you’d receive if you used the search engine such as Google Australia, so results can sometimes be unexpected.
The flybuys offer however offers you direct compensation for installing the toolbar. The question you need to ask is whether the offer is worth the effort and whether you are happy with the functionality.
You receive:
50 bonus points.
Up to 100 points per month.
Using the figure that 2000 points equals 10 flybuy dollars each point is worth approximately half a cent. Thus the bonus is worth 25 cents and the points each month 50 cents. In the first year this could be worth up to $6.25.
In return you give:
Screen space in your browser.
Change to using Yahoo. (Over 95% of people in Australia currently use Google.)
I decided to test the toolbar. I received an installation error “Internet Explorer raised Unhandled Exception” installing under Windows 8 with Internet Explorer 10. A concern because since something didn’t work correctly you wonder if anything has harmed your computer. After the error the toolbar appears to function normally. The temperature is not currently working for me but generally I prefer using the Bureau of Meteorology site for weather information.
Yahoo will receive your search information and a third party organisation FreeCause also receives your search information. Exactly who gets what information is very hard to determine by you as a user. You can read the privacy policy information for each site but you have to ask yourself is it worth the time for the small amount being offered.
A couple of features I thought were interesting, is you can immediately see your points total and each time you reach a point for searching you are alerted and you can see how many points you’ve accumulated.
I’ve often felt that giving all your search requests to a single search company such as Google means they know a great deal about you. If you kept the address area set to search using Google and the toolbar to search using Yahoo, you can easily send half your searches to each and reduce the amount of information each company has on you. In addition I find Google and Yahoo often provide different results and having two search engines easily accessible may assist in finding better information.
Personally I’d suggest to clients to keep their browser as free as possible of third party toolbars. If there is a specific reason to install a toolbar then go for it, but otherwise a clean computer is faster and easier to maintain.
I hope this article helps others to determine whether or not to install the Flybuys toolbar. Really at the end of the day the benefit is around $6 a year and that isn’t a great deal of money.
Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
Call 0415 910 703 for computer support.
Servicing Doncaster, Templestowe, Eltham and the surrounding area.
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