Yahoo, AOL results biased in favor of parent company Verizon’s websites

https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/verizon-media-search.html

by mikro2nd • 6 years ago

285 77 6 years ago

empath75• 6 years ago

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.

pergadad2• 6 years ago

3% of 300 Mio is 1 Mio, not 10 Mio ....

gabagool• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

tracker12• 6 years ago

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...

linuxftw• 6 years ago

That search traffic is probably largely DNS lookup failure spam searches.

sorenn111• 6 years ago

For all the worries about tech monopolies and oligopolies, I am always more worried about the ISP's and their power.

caconym_3• 6 years ago

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.

Red_Leaves_Flyy2• 6 years ago

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.

cosmie• 6 years ago

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/technotes/v...

tracker12• 6 years ago

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.

pacala• 6 years ago

You are setting a false dichotomy. Most people that care about privacy are angry at _both_ ISP stalkers _and_ BigTech stalkers.

That being said, BigTech has developed significant stronger capabilities for aggregating and exploiting the data at scale, and using it for manipulating mass behavior. It's their business model: serve ads and curate content for maximum $$$ and engagement. For better or worse, ISPs just pass bits around on behalf of their customers, without deciding which bits to show and which to hide. Given the death of net neutrality things may change, but for now ISPs have a lot of ground to cover to become as noxious as BigTech.

jariel• 6 years ago

Yes. If there had to be a group of people to have access to so much data, I trust Googlers more than I trust my own government both in terms of ethics and definitely competence.

That said, I don't really trust them much either.

Google has existential power from their information and search. If they wanted to be a hedge fund, my god, they'd be very successful. Most elections these days are narrow, if they wanted to tilt the board in one direction, they absolutely could - which is a shocking thing to consider.

Imagine if you're French, and some massive foreign company could adjust their algorithm so that most of the news about Candidate A was good and Candidate B was bad.

Sometimes it's hard for Americans, in particular, to get the concept of such foreign control because nobody is 'big and powerful' enough to control the US.

But consider the analogy: everyone in the US uses Baidu. Everyone buys a lot from Alibaba. Most people read China Daily and watch films made and produced in China. Chinese stars are beloved and often more influential than local stars.

It's almost incomprehensible, but that's what it's like being in most countries in the world.

So you can argue about Verizon/AOL etc - but to people outside the US, it's a more existential concern.

signaru• 6 years ago

I think the real news here is that people still use these search engines. :D

Frost1x• 6 years ago

"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• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

Such an uninspired name.

dna_polymerase• 6 years ago

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.

pergadad2• 6 years ago

Lots of people tricked through browser toolbars and self-installing "configuration CDs" i guess

d2wa6• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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

notRobot• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

No we're not.

dksidana• 6 years ago

even on bing ?

lostgame• 6 years ago

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. :)

wolco3• 6 years ago

On average what percent do most search results served come from bing vs your ddg crawls or any of the other 400 sources?

Ygg2• 6 years ago

I thought DDG was powered by Bing, like Yahoo. Not DDG by Yahoo by Bing. Color me surprised. Any evidence for this claim?

zenexer2• 6 years ago

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).

varelaz• 6 years ago

Could it be that Google is biased? Why everything is biased when compared to Google?

zenexer2• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

lhball• 6 years ago

I’m shocked, shocked, to see favoritism going on in this establishment /s

speedgoose• 6 years ago

I'm quite sure I see Google products and services on top of Google search.

iscrewyou• 6 years ago

And Google gets scrutinized for that. Now it’s Verizon’s turn. It’s good to know what and when these companies are doing.

IAmEveryone3• 6 years ago

But those are easily recognised as Google properties, allowing you to easily scroll past if you want to avoid them.

That's vastly different from selling "organic" rankings, or boosting your own products.

As an analogy: Google's approach is like The New York Times printing full-page ads for "NYT Caribbean Cruises" or whatever their side businesses are, while what Verizon is doing is as if The Washington Post ran "12 Great Products Now on Amazon" articles indistinguishable from their articles.

To give an idea of how strict the latter would break with tradition: I once designed a full-page ad in the New York Times for a non-profit event. They made us change the design because ads are not allowed to use a 4(?)-column layout. Their own design is also 4-column and they want ads to stand out. The same applies to fonts, colours, etc.

girst• 6 years ago

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.

chadlavi• 6 years ago

It is truly terrifying that people still use Yahoo and AOL

trts• 6 years ago

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.

redis_mlc• 6 years ago

Yahoo's email client is one of the best in terms of usability.

The story there is that Marissa Mayer wanted employees to use it internally, so it got heavily dogfooded and improved. (Yahoo employees were using Google docs and sheets for company use like password lists. lol.)

It's worked as your described above for a few years, but they claim to have made speed improvements recently (as it was unusable on low-end devices like netbooks.)

The problem with Yahoo Mail is that Mayer allowed a FISA order to install a kernel-level sniffing module on email servers, and I never heard if that was removed (interpret that as a no.) In addition, their network was pwned multiple times, so there's that too.

https://www.engadget.com/2016/10/08/reuters-yahoo-email-scan...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/16/yahoo_forged_cookie...

Source: ex-Yahoo, offered role as technical lead of Mail.

akersten4• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

"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.

akersten4• 6 years ago

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.

duckmysick• 6 years ago

If they are promoted results, they should be marked as such.

mthoms4• 6 years ago

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".

akersten4• 6 years ago

"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.

d2wa6• 6 years ago

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.

akersten4• 6 years ago

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?

50ckpuppet2• 6 years ago

It's a free market, shop someplace else.

bmelton• 6 years ago

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.

CapriciousCptl• 6 years ago

Search engines aren't selling peanuts clearly marked as store-brand; they're showing information most users presume is in descending order of relevance.

raz32dust• 6 years ago

Both are wrong. It gets more and more wrong as the entry barrier for a new player becomes bigger and bigger. So Google promoting their content is FAR more detrimental than Yahoo promoting Verizon content, because Google drives most of the traffic. One solution is to force the producer of any service to always be decoupled from the distributor or marketplace. So Amazon cannot promote Amazon Basics stuff knowingly, Target cannot promote its own brand, and Google cannot promote its own sites.

Why are both wrong? This is a question of ethics, and is therefore subjective. It depends on your personal values. "Free markets are good" is one of my values, so both are wrong through that lens. If you do not believe that enabling competition is good, then it is not wrong.

_bxg1• 6 years ago

That'd be a problem if anybody ever used them

50ckpuppet2• 6 years ago

Is the story that this is happening or that people are honestly surprised this is happening.

IAmEveryone3• 6 years ago

It's not happening at that other, reputable search engine.

Of course if you take pride in cynic nihilism, nothing bad will surprise you. But lowering your standards very quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You'll get your entirely corrupt politicians, for example. Because the honest ones leave after a few years of being constantly called "corrupt" or "stupid" with zero connection between what they are actually doing and the feedback they get.

scarface74• 6 years ago

And how is this different than Google?

ummonk• 6 years ago

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?

Ceezy• 6 years ago

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?

magwa101• 6 years ago

NOOOOO How could this be?

Yahoo, AOL results biased in favor of parent company Verizon’s websites

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