I just checked the original video. It works a little bit differently than plain URL replacement. They open another tab in the background and then send a manipulated URL to get the affiliate cookie set to their own. Guess it’s for the courts to decide if that is a legal practice or not. But to me it seems that the malicious extension sends a manipulated URL to the server pretending to do that on user’s behalf, without his knowledge. That is classic malware behavior.

https://youtu.be/vc4yL3YTwWk?t=281

Potato chips and chocolate. It was difficult but necessary to have them both at the same time

It’s more than that, at least from a EU perspective. Don’t know what is legal in the US, but manipulating URLs in an obviously malicious way and without the user’s explicit knowledge and consent would be highly illegal here.

I don’t know. Maybe Google is actively limiting results for Startpage. When I don’t find what I’m looking for in Startpage I switch to Google and boom, adequate search result. I refuse to permanently go back to Google though.

I’m using Startpage too, but I have a feeling that the search result quality had a massive drop lately.