Lars asks:
> are you talking about http://www.altavista.com or
> http://www.altavista.digital.com (notice the subtle
> difference between those URLs ;-)

No, this is the real thing, altavista.digital.com.

I was aware of all the usual risks of websurfing with respect to people
recording your accesses and whatnot, but usually you aren't too bothered
by the fact that when you visit site X, site X knows about it.  Of course
there's nothing stopping site X from selling this information to someone
else, but that's a risk you take and you can usually judge from the
reputation of a site whether they would be likely to do something like
this (you (probably) wouldn't generally expect to find HP or IBM selling
detailed www access logs for example).  The DoubleClick stuff is just too
annoying however.  Your information is being sent directly off to some
company that you probably don't even know exists, and the site hosting
the web page that contains the ad doesn't even have an opportunity to
control what is done with the information.  This would be bad enough,
but the deliberate transfer to a third party of search keywords as is
being done by AltaVista is just a horrible invasion of personal and
corporate privacy.

Oh, BTW, DoubleClick also attempts to set a cookie in your browser so
that they can correlate all accesses from your PC even if it is hidden
behind a proxy server.

G.