The answer from the developer of Awesome Screenshot:
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Developer 1 hour
@All, since many of you don't like this feature, we removed
it in the version 3.2.1.
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Developer 39 minutes
@All,
Hi All, This is Joel, developer of awesome screenshot. I am so sorry to add
the amazon search result in google search result page without info
our users first. It's such a bad decision.
This additional features was designed to scratch our own itch. Because when
I search some shopping items in google, I always want to check them
in amazon at the same time.
In the spirit of transparency, we should disclose that this feature
does bring small amount of revenue to us, which enables us to continue
to improve this product. Since so many users don't like it,
*we already updated a new version(3.2.1) to remove this feature*.
I think they should make this feature optional and disabled by default.
Nobody would ever see it. Enabling new feature discovery in software is a very hard problem. Just throwing in features and hoping people will find them is not a good philosophy.
In this case, I would probably have shown it by default with text including "why am I seeing this?" and a "don't show this anymore" button.
I provided a customize button beside the amazon search result page for users to disable it. But it seems many users don't like it, so I removed this feature completely.
1. The feature is orthogonal to the plugin. Alone, you probably could have survived this one.
2. The feature came to light for many through negative press. With number 1, that pretty much kills the feature in the current extension.
Rather than just killing the feature altogether, though, you could release it as a new extension. Add a couple other ecommerce sites and call it a shopping assistant.
