The entry I wrote back in 2004 about blocking Intellitxt-style context ads consistently gets the most search engine hits of any page on my website. Naturally, it’s a little out-of-date. Other providers have sprung up, and Intellitxt now uses a unique hostname for each site using the service. Because of that, using the hosts file to redirect certain domains doesn’t work so well anymore (you’d have to add an entry for every site whose ads you want to block). So here’s what I know now:

• For Internet Explorer, the best approach is still to add the domain to the “Restricted Sites” list. (Tools->Internet Options->Security). Add *.intellitxt.com, *.kontera.com, *.linkworth.com, *.echotopic.com and *.adgardener.com (which is the site for Lingospot) to your Restricted Sites zone. This prevents the add-injecting scripts from running.
• Firefox doesn’t have anything like IE’s Restricted Sites, so things are a little more complicated. You’ll need the GreaseMonkey add-on installed, but once you have that you can download Grant Goodale’s clever user script that removes the ad links after the page loads.
• Opera and others…uh, I dunno. If you have any ideas, please leave a comment.

I’m not anti-advertising per se, but I find these ads extremely intrusive, and the relevance to the page content (while better than it was in 2004) is sometimes lacking:

Wow, I can do a web search in my browser? Thanks, guys!