Smiley Central

» see smileycentral.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The emoticon pack itself never had a Turkish moment. What reached here was the layer underneath it. By the middle of the 2000s, opening somebody else's computer meant finding a stack of toolbars sitting on top of Internet Explorer and a search box that was not Google, with nobody in the house able to say when they had agreed to any of it. Being the computer engineer in the family means you have uninstalled a great deal of software you never installed.

Smiley Central launched in 2002 and registered its domain in April 2003. The visible product was a free download that put a palette of smiley faces into your email client and your instant messenger, several thousand of them by the later versions, animated, sorted into categories. It worked exactly as advertised, which is worth saying, because the thing people remember about it is the part that was not advertised.

That part was MyWebSearch. Installing the smileys installed a browser toolbar that took over your default search and your home page, then fed the queries back to the parent company, which sold that traffic on to search advertisers. The smileys were free because they were not the thing being sold.

It did not travel alone. Fun Web Products was a whole catalog out of the same house. Cursor Mania replaced your mouse pointer and Webfetti decorated your MySpace profile, and every single one of them carried the same toolbar in the same installer.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the money underneath ~

The economics were plain and the numbers were enormous. Focus Interactive, which had started life in 1999 as the company behind iWon.com, went to Ask Jeeves in 2004 as part of Interactive Search Holdings for $501 million. IAC bought Ask Jeeves outright the following year for $1.85 billion. Somewhere inside those figures is the market value of a search box on a few million desktops whose owners did not choose it.

By 2009 the operation had been renamed Mindspark Interactive Network and ran as its own business unit inside IAC. It later bought Apalon and moved into mobile apps, which is where the surviving revenue went.

~ the removal industry ~

An entire cottage economy of instructions grew around this software. Antivirus vendors classified MyWebSearch as adware and Malwarebytes carried a detection named Adware.Mindspark for years. Forum threads titled some version of "Smiley Central, is it spyware?" ran from 2004 well into the 2010s, and the answers were always long, because the uninstaller was known not to take everything with it.

None of it was illegal. The installer showed a license agreement that described the toolbar, and people clicked through it the way people click through all of them.

~ the corporate paper trail ~

Nobody ever announced the death of Smiley Central. Software in this category does not get a farewell post, because what ends is a distribution deal rather than a service. The installers stop being pushed, and some years later the domain stops resolving.

What is dateable is the company. Mindspark Interactive Network was dissolved on 1 June 2021 and what remained moved into a successor called Ask Applications. Today smileycentral.com is still registered, held through a corporate registrar with the record last touched in 2026, and it has no DNS behind it. So do funwebproducts.com and mywebsearch.com. That is what a defensive domain looks like when nobody intends to serve anything from it again.

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