Anyone else noticed Ask.com bidding on a lot of brand names, misspells & urls like ebay used to show on ?

Maybe it’s the “red car syndrome” that’s kicked in where someone says red car and all you notice all day is red cars but it does seem Ask.com has took over where ebay affiliates left off in regard to bidding on brands, misspells and urls.

I’m still waiting to see my first “Find Cancer at Ask.com” advert but they do seem to have morphed into an ebay style traffic operation mixed with a corporate branded version of an MFA (Made For Adsense) site as all the user often sees when they land on the Ask.com site after clicking an advert is a nice list of Adsense ads to click, most of which they just left behind on Google itself so where’s the “quality user experience” Adwords supposedly craves here ?

If MFA sites were so bad that Google declared war on them, how are Ask.com getting away with this kind of recycling still ?  Here’s an example for a prezzybox.com misspell “prezzie box” :

The quality of the natural search listings isn’t that hot either, maybe making users more inclined to click something they see in bold in the Google Adwords links !?

Prezzybox isn’t even in the natural results at all for this misspell whilst on Google it’s number one so relevancy isn’t as good by any stretch and the differentiation between natural listings and sponsored on Ask  is very vague with the “sponsored results” text shunted over far right out of the way and the links, text and urls all looking the same regardless of if paid or natural so all the paid links blend right in.

Am I being paranoid or has anyone else seen Ask’s shift towards brand orientated traffic and do you think it’s a glorified MFA site too ?