uh oh, is autolink a page from gator's playbook?

i just realized (and it's been pointed out by various other people around the web) that if you're browsing at barnes and noble and you click the autolink button, it turns the ISBN number into a link to amazon. i'm sure amazon is thrilled by this, but i would have to say that it sounds eerily similar to gator.com's offercompanion program. widely regarded as spyware, offercompanion would sometimes pop up ads for competitors while users were browsing and making purchases at other sites.

while doing this might be legal, i would have to say that when i checked it out it made me a bit uneasy.