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Yahoo fiddles with your search results
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by LZZR | July 30, 2007 at 04:47 am
1198 views | 8 Recommendations | 3 comments
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Contrary to what is being constantly declared by all major Search Engine representatives they do manually alter what you see as search results. Now a hard proof emerges. What you see on this screenshot is an internal Yahoo interface urging Yahoo employees to "report bad results or ads".
Remakkably as it becomes clear from this discussion Yahoo! people guilty of this stupid leak are not even denying the authenticity of this screenshot. Their line of defence is to pretend that nothing important had happened and it's "just internal quality assurance". Needless to remark that such practices in a multi-billion dollar SEM market is just an invitation to a large scale internal corruption.
It's not perhaps a conicidence that with this kind of corporate culture cases of Yahoo Censorship are mounting and this plagued even those essentially nice services like MyBlogLog that had been resently acuired by Yahoo. Check this funy story for details.
Source: LZZR.com
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (3)
at 06:16 on July 30th, 2007
LZZR, fascinating stuff -- thanks for this. Does Yahoo! really have a hard-and-fast policy that they won't alter search results under any circumstances, though?
at 21:54 on July 30th, 2007
You are right - I couldn't find any explicit statement from Yahoo! concerning this matter. The problem is that all major Search Engines put a lot of PR efforts to keep you under impression that their results page placement is fully automated, algorythmical etc and therefore impartial. This belief is so deeply rooted in SEO community that most simply refuse to believe that Search Engines can do this :-) .
From their own point of view it's only logical for Search Engine management team to excercise a small "internal quality assurance" from time to time. But imagine how it feels in the other side of the divide (if suppose you are a SEO or a Webmaster) knowing that a site you work so hard on building and promoting can be edited out by some insignificant Search Engine employee. Even more disturbing is the thought that this can potentially be done to your competitor. Forget the level playing field if manual altering of search results is a sort of daily practice we have completely different rules of engagement here.
at 09:50 on July 31st, 2007
LZZR, I like this story. It's good stuff. I had experienced Yahoo!'s disrespectful policy towards their users on MyBlogLog and there are plenty of comments on my blog confirming I am not the only one.