Yeah well, google is "free" too... yet somehow they're "worth" billions.
Google is only free if you think of them as a search engine company. They're not--they're an advertising company. The world's largest advertising company, in fact. And their advertising services aren't free--in fact, they're quite expensive.
Understood. But for me (and most here i suspect), we've been getting the benefits of free searches for over a decade without spending a single penny, much less clicking on an ad even... unless an actual purchase was our original purpose in searching to begin with.
Heh, i recall searching for some band called 'Fences' -- boy, that's a dumb name, unless you don't want to be found on the web easily. And many results nowadays from other similar vague search terms contain links to really silly pages trying to sell all sorts of stuff. And some of those links turn out to be merely another contrived search designed to sell something else.
Of course —beyond raw advertising —our usage habits (clicking/viewing/downloading/etc) are also being tracked... providing whatever info to whichever agencies. So perhaps that may be something Sophos is also doing to get their income[?] E.g., scanned filenames get culled into some huge database? :shrug: idunno. Maybe they're serving ads too somewhere. [i'm blocking flash and also certain sites via /etc/hosts, so i don't see everything i guess.]
