[HN Gopher] Yahoo, AOL results biased in favor of parent company...
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Yahoo, AOL results biased in favor of parent company Verizon's
websites
Author : mikro2nd
Score : 193 points
Date : 2020-03-17 12:35 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ctrl.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ctrl.blog)
| 50ckpuppet wrote:
| Is the story that this is happening or that people are honestly
| surprised this is happening.
| speedgoose wrote:
| I'm quite sure I see Google products and services on top of
| Google search.
| iscrewyou wrote:
| And Google gets scrutinized for that. Now it's Verizon's turn.
| It's good to know what and when these companies are doing.
| scarface74 wrote:
| And how is this different than Google?
| empath75 wrote:
| > Verizon Media-owned search engines have decreased from a market
| share of 4,10 % in February 2019 to 3,63 % in the United States
| in February 2020, according to StatCounter Global Stats. 3,63 %
| of the internet-connected population of the US is roughly 10,6
| million people.
|
| It's pretty safe to say the only people using those search
| engines are people who really like aol or yahoo properties for
| some reason.
| linuxftw wrote:
| That search traffic is probably largely DNS lookup failure spam
| searches.
| pergadad wrote:
| 3% of 300 Mio is 1 Mio, not 10 Mio ....
| gabagool wrote:
| 3% of 300 million = 9 million.
|
| That said, the latest figures I have seen predict the US
| internet connected population to be 293 million [1]. That
| figure comes out to 10.63%.
|
| [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/325645/usa-number-
| of-int...
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > It's pretty safe to say the only people using those search
| engines are people who really like aol or yahoo properties for
| some reason.
|
| People who use Yahoo/ AOL are people who use those sites out of
| habit and are happier with the crap experience they get there
| than learning new technologies. My mom and one of my former
| bosses were tied to Yahoo & AOL respectively and it was 100%
| just the comfort of the devil they knew.
| tracker1 wrote:
| My grandmother (before she passed) used Yahoo as her homepage
| and main search from there... It's what I originally put on
| her computer long before Yahoo got bad, and it's what she
| stuck with as a result. It was actually painful to see...
| girst wrote:
| Are these results surprising? Probably not. But does that mean we
| shouldn't talk about them? Because that's what (a portion of)
| this comment section seems to think.
| varelaz wrote:
| Could it be that Google is biased? Why everything is biased when
| compared to Google?
| zenexer wrote:
| They weren't just being compared to Google. They were mostly
| being compared to Bing. Remember, the underlying data provider
| for Verizon's search results is Bing. When compared to other
| Bing-powered search engines, the ordering of results should be
| nearly identical.
| yellow_postit wrote:
| There's no universal guidelines for (document|query) rankings
| so the "bias" is always going to be very hard to find a
| smoking gun for. The appearance of bias in the rankings is a
| real issue that companies (and regulators?) should care
| about.
| sorenn111 wrote:
| For all the worries about tech monopolies and oligopolies, I am
| always more worried about the ISP's and their power.
| caconym_ wrote:
| Them and the ecosystem of data brokers and marketing companies
| that are invisible to consumers and yet do far, _far_ sketchier
| things with personal data.
|
| Like, remember that thing where cell carriers were literally
| selling real-time user-specific location data to, essentially,
| anybody who could pay? And probably still are? I can't conceive
| of how people can be so angry at "Big Tech" but not at these
| shadowy fuckers who are doing so much worse things wrt. your
| data.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Try searching on google for nyt retractions sometime. For
| that matter, twitter and facebook manipulation also can have
| some very direct influences... After it's all said and done,
| they're all a huge cesspool of deceit.
|
| An mobile, I'm using Brave (FF just didn't work right with
| ublock for me), and using uBlock and Privacy badger on
| desktop.
|
| I _really_ wish browsers were far more restricted on IFrames
| more than 1-layer deep... cross-origin on 2+ layers of
| IFrames is all ads.. if the networks really cared, they 'd
| work around it if they were cutoff from
| cookies/session/localstorage etc... As it is, layer of huge
| JS and tracking, nope, no ad, pass to another layer, etc. 85%
| of overhead is often in layers of ad iframes, cut them off at
| the knees technically... no cookies or data access 2+ layers
| deep.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| Data brokers are a part of big tech as much as apple and
| Netflix are.
|
| Apple has a more aggressive stance than most companies but
| even they are pathetically far from being privacy first. I'm
| a big fan of the proposals to treat all used data as
| radioactive waste that if mishandled, even accidentally, can
| destroy entire companies. It is absurd that we're even having
| these conversations. We're one dictator away from another
| genocide on the soil of a world leader. China
| notwithstanding. These vast databases can be misused to
| quickly indentured entire minority populations in countries.
| We've gotten a taste of this under trump with the "illegals".
| If we're unfortunate to find ourselves under an actual
| dictator trump will pale in comparison. By excising all
| customer data from companies we prevent countless attacks,
| and make many other attacks far harder.
| caconym_ wrote:
| I agree with you on the "radioactive waste" aspect, but I
| put "big tech" in quotes to suggest the sense in which lay
| people tend to interpret the phrase. I'm fine if there is
| an angry public response to _all_ of it, but if we 've
| going to be selective (only angry at the sexy companies
| with consumer-facing products) then IMO our selection to
| date has been suboptimal wrt. effective protection of
| consumers.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| We're in agreement!
|
| Unfortunately, I think it's going to take wholesale
| misuse of the data of large swathes of the population
| that dwarfs the reach of Equifax and the sensitivity of
| ashley Madison while effecting at least a couple ultra
| wealthy public names, to get sane consumer data
| protection laws with teeth and enforcement.
| cosmie wrote:
| > Like, remember that thing where cell carriers were
| literally selling real-time user-specific location data to,
| essentially, anybody who could pay? And probably still are?
|
| Or before that, when they caught flak for header
| injection[1]. Which is still a thing according to the
| "Subscriber ID Headers" section of [2], just gated behind a
| whitelist instead of sprayed out to everyone. It'd be
| interesting to know if the rise in HTTPS traffic has reduced
| the utility of that, or if they've found a mitigation for
| that inconvenience.
|
| [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh
|
| [2] https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/analytics/technote
| s/v...
| ummonk wrote:
| If I have a search engine and I create some other services that I
| believe are better than competitors' services, shouldn't I be
| putting my other services at the top of search results?
| lhball wrote:
| I'm shocked, shocked, to see favoritism going on in this
| establishment /s
| notRobot wrote:
| Putting this out there in case folks aren't aware:
|
| DuckDuckGo is powered almost entirely by Yahoo!. In turn, Yahoo!
| search is powered almost entirely by Bing.
| epi0Bauqu wrote:
| No we're not.
| lostgame wrote:
| Ha, this is why I love HN.
|
| Thanks for the awesomeness of DDG, and if you ever need help
| with your mobile site, let me know. claire at theoic dot me.
|
| I love what you guys do, but your mobile UX leaves a ton to
| be desired and even some very basic tweaks would go a long
| way to significant improvement. :)
| dksidana wrote:
| even on bing ?
| mtmail wrote:
| epi0Bauqu is the founder of DuckDuckGo, he will know.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| I thought DDG was powered by Bing, like Yahoo. Not DDG by Yahoo
| by Bing. Color me surprised. Any evidence for this claim?
| zenexer wrote:
| This is incorrect. Per https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-
| help-pages/results/so...:
|
| > _...DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred
| sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering
| niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-
| sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes).
| We also of course have more traditional links in the search
| results, which we also source from multiple partners, though
| most commonly from Bing (and none from Google)._
| chadlavi wrote:
| It is truly terrifying that people still use Yahoo and AOL
| trts wrote:
| I logged into my old yahoo mail account the other day and was
| surprised to find it had some interesting upgrades, such as
| views for emails containing photos and receipts. It was a fun
| way to time travel.
|
| In fact, except for (or maybe due to) the entirely blank pane
| on the right that presumably has a bunch of ads blocked, looks
| cleaner and more appealing than what gmail has become.
| brundolf wrote:
| That'd be a problem if anybody ever used them
| akersten wrote:
| Can someone explain to me how this is problematic? If you go to a
| grocery store, you will see store-brand items promoted too. They
| will be cheaper and possibly more prominent on the shelves than
| name-brand items. They might even be in disguise (e.g. Archer
| Farms is a Target brand).
|
| How is this any worse or wrong?
| intopieces wrote:
| "Wrong" or "worse" is usually measured as a product of the
| impact to the customer, measured in value: that is, when a
| potential conflict of interest results in a lower cost the
| consumer, it's usually deemed acceptable.
|
| What is a similar measurement for information? Grocery stores
| only sell physical goods; they don't, for example, determine
| what medical information you see, or what information about
| political candidates you consume... those are things that
| search engines do.
|
| So you see why this could be "worse" and "wrong": there isn't a
| good way to measure the impact and the scope of influence is
| much larger.
| akersten wrote:
| > What is a similar measurement for information? Grocery
| stores only sell physical goods; they don't, for example,
| determine what medical information you see, or what
| information about political candidates you consume... those
| are things that search engines do.
|
| Okay, but that's a different discussion. Google showing
| Google Maps first instead of Apple Maps on a search for
| "maps" is not related to the kind of shadowy political
| subterfuge you're referencing here.
|
| I still don't see what's wrong with highlighting your own
| products to your customers, which is the discussion here.
| d2wa wrote:
| The Apple Maps service doesn't have a web presence, so
| they're not even trying to compete with Google Maps on the
| web. A map service is objectively more useful than a
| promotional page trying to sell iOS devices with a built-in
| Maps app.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > Please respond to the strongest plausible
| interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one
| that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. [0]
|
| Replace "maps" with the names of any competing products
| from both companies with a web presence that can be
| linked to in search results, if you want to genuinely
| rebut the point.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| taffer wrote:
| > The Apple Maps service doesn't have a web presence
|
| It kind of has:
| https://maps.apple.com/place?address=San%20Francisco
| d2wa wrote:
| No, it doesn't: https://maps.apple.com/robots.txt
| duckmysick wrote:
| If they are promoted results, they should be marked as such.
| CapriciousCptl wrote:
| Search engines aren't selling peanuts clearly marked as store-
| brand; they're showing information most users presume is in
| descending order of relevance.
| mthoms wrote:
| When performing a search you are implicitly asking to see the
| "best" (most on-topic) results according to an impartial
| computer algorithm.
|
| That's the user expectation.
|
| A corporation inserting its own pages into organic results
| means it's not a search engine anymore. It's "a paid directory
| service _augmented_ by a search engine ".
| akersten wrote:
| > "best" (most on-topic) results according to an impartial
| computer algorithm.
|
| Any algorithm looking for the "best" result is inherently
| partial to _something_. Best result in terms of most recent,
| most local to you, most-likely-what-you-actually-want, I
| mean, the dimensions are endless.
|
| The concept of "organic search results" is only possible if
| the algorithm were public, and that's just not a realistic
| expectation.
|
| >A corporation inserting its own pages into organic results
| means it's not a search engine anymore. It's "a paid
| directory service augmented by a search engine".
|
| I mean, Google doesn't have to pay themselves to promote
| their own pages. If you want to split the difference at "a
| search engine, part of a larger business whose results might
| show up preferentially in that search because why wouldn't
| they," that makes sense to me.
| mthoms wrote:
| I thought it would have been obvious, but to clarify what I
| meant by _impartial_ and _organic_ -- I mean "ranked using
| the same criteria regardless of origin".
|
| Of course any human-written algorithm will have bias. But
| it's a reasonable expectation (and the current norm) that
| every page faces the same bias.
|
| I'm not sure where you're going with your last comment. If
| you've got evidence that Google is manually promoting its
| own pages within the search results (not ads) then please
| provide sources. This has never been proven and Google have
| consistently maintained they don't do it.
|
| (I'm not a Google fan but I believe them in this case
| because of the anti-trust implications)
| d2wa wrote:
| They're often cheaper because the store increases the price of
| the competitors' wares to make their own store-product more
| appealing. It increases the price to consumers.
|
| Can't both practices be wrong?
|
| Grocery stores shouldn't be allowed to sell their own brands
| that compete with the otherwise free market. It's an abuse of
| their position in the value chain. Heinz Ketchup can't compete
| with the store brand on equal terms when the store sets the
| prices for both products.
| 50ckpuppet wrote:
| It's a free market, shop someplace else.
| akersten wrote:
| > Can't both practices be wrong? and an abuse of their market
| position?
|
| Sure. But my point is that no one is railing Kroger for
| putting their cheap pasta above the DeCecco. So it's
| hypocritical to call out tech companies for doing what
| physical retailers have been doing for ages.
|
| If we're not mad about the pasta, we shouldn't be mad about
| Flickr being #2 on the search for "photos". And if we are mad
| about Google Photos being #1, why aren't we mad about the
| pasta?
| mthoms wrote:
| Your analogy is flawed.
|
| Google's value proposition is to provide the most
| useful/accurate results for your query. Period. That's
| Google search's "raison d'etre".
|
| Kroger makes no such (equivalent) claim.
| d2wa wrote:
| I'm mad about the pasta too. Price gouging is usually
| regulated internationally, though. E.g. groceries in India
| are labeled with a maximum retail price set by the
| manufacturer to avoid problems like this.
| bmelton wrote:
| > They're often cheaper because the store increases the price
| of the competitors' wares to make their own store-product
| more appealing
|
| Maybe irrelevant to the point, but in my experience that is
| very wrong. They're cheaper because:
|
| * they have approximately zero marketing costs other than the
| cost of the shelf space, which they have better insight to
| sizing than their competitors
|
| * They didn't have to spend as much testing and refining to
| develop a quality product, because they already have a good
| sense of what the market is after because they're copying
| something people want
|
| * They don't have to maintain a staff of salespeople working
| to negotiate their products into stores. They know exactly
| where their product is destined to go, and how much to
| produce to satisfy market demands.
|
| * Because they have split-tested the price against which
| users see their value brand as enough of a bargain to switch
| from Fruit Loops to Fruity-Ohs or whatever.
|
| Yes, there is _a_ portion of that component that has to do
| with the margins applied against the name brands, but stores
| aren 't marking up their competitors' prices beyond the
| normal markup, and just as an aside, if Fruity-Ohs were
| selling better at a price than Fruit Loops, the store would
| increase their pricing. TLDR, if the market agreed, it would
| be very possible for the generic brands to cost more than the
| name brands, but due to point 1 (marketing) that is extremely
| unlikely to happen.
| signaru wrote:
| I think the real news here is that people still use these search
| engines. :D
| Frost1x wrote:
| "OneSearch" is completely new to me. I know Yahoo has a decent
| market in Asia, Japan I believe. I'm always surprised to see
| AOL mentioned in any context outside of history anymore.
| betamaxthetape wrote:
| Note that Yahoo! Japan is separate from Yahoo. When Verizon
| bough Yahoo, certain patents, holdings and investments were
| not part of the sale and were spun off into a new business
| called Altaba.
|
| The (minority) stake in Yahoo! Japan that was owned by Yahoo
| is now owned by Altaba. Probably the only connection between
| Yahoo and Yahoo! Japan is the name, which Yahoo! Japan
| license from Verison.
|
| source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-m-a-verizon-
| idUSKCN...
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Such an uninspired name.
| d2wa wrote:
| It's an old codename for Yahoo! Search's in-house search
| engine. Back in the day when they still had one.
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| I see those on computers run buy laymen who somehow installed
| one of those nasty toolbars that change the default search to
| Yahoo or other stuff.
| pergadad wrote:
| Lots of people tricked through browser toolbars and self-
| installing "configuration CDs" i guess
| d2wa wrote:
| Some of their success can be explained by the tyranny of the
| default. Some browsers use these search engine by default in
| some regions, and people don't tend to change the defaults. I
| don't know for sure, but I'd be surprised if Verizon don't set
| it as the default on at least some of the devices they sell.
| Didn't they recently announce Yahoo! Mobile as a cellphone
| service too?
| rajlego wrote:
| Surprised to see they're launching Yahoo Mobile in the west
| but there actually already is a ymobile in Japan that I
| personally use for data/calling. I use my own phone with it
| but I can't imagine them being able to set yahoo as default
| on any iphone or android phone they sell
| Ceezy wrote:
| This "study" for sure doesn t prove anything. And fore sure not a
| bias. How do you know that the other search engine are not bias
| either?
| SeanFerree wrote:
| Glad to hear. I always assumed Yahoo was biased. Wasn't sure AOL
| was still around since Instant Messenger :)
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