Update: I've created a GreaseMonkey script that automates all this. You can find it here or over at userscripts.org. More installation info here.

You might have noticed a recent trend in web advertising - keyword linking. Essentially, web sites are contracting a company named Vibrant Media to scan their web pages, find keywords that advertisers have paid for and link them to advertisements that appear when your mouse hovers over the word. These links are recognizable by the double underline beneath them (and of course, the big ad that pops up when you put your mouse near them). You can see an example and more information on the technique here. I'm using this site because they, unlike most other sites using the technology, provide a link to turn them off.

Personally, I see enough advertising in the average day to choke a whole team of horses, so I immediately started looking for a way to turn these ads off. It would seem that Vibrant Media doesn't provide any sort of general opt-out page. Meh. So, time for a bit of sleuthing. It turns out that disabling IntelliTXT ads for any random site is pretty easy - here's what you do:

1. Find the front page of your favorite IntelliTXT-using site.



2. View the source of the front page - the raw html (both Firefox and IE have ways of doing this). What you're looking for is a URL of the form:

   http://SITE_NAME.us.intellitxt.com/intellitxt/front.asp?ipid=ID

   Make a note of the text in SITE_NAME (likely to be the name of the web site you're viewing) and ID (likely to be a four-digit number). You'll need them.



3. Now we're going to construct the URL that turns off IntelliTXT. It's going to look like this (I've split the URL across two lines for clarity - be sure and remove the line break and backslash to make this all one line):

   http://SITE_NAME.us.intellitxt.com/intellitxt/switch.asp? \
   ipid=ID&state=off&url=http://www.SITE_NAME.com/

   Copy the values of SITE_NAME and ID into the URL above, then paste the result into your browser.



4. That's it! You should be redirected to the front page of your chosen site, which should be blissfully free of double underlined words.

Now, go try it out on a couple of sites and let me know how it works for you.