
Yahoo, AOL results biased in favor of parent company Verizon’s websites - mikro2nd
https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/verizon-media-search.html
======
sorenn111
For all the worries about tech monopolies and oligopolies, I am always more
worried about the ISP's and their power.

~~~
caconym_
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.

~~~
pacala
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.

~~~
_jal
> For better or worse, ISPs just pass bits around on behalf of their
> customers, without deciding which bits to show and which to hide

Comcast does DPI and will inject "warnings" into your port 80 traffic if they
see you downloading bits they disapprove of. They've also been caught blocking
sites multiple times; it is always a "mistake", but somehow also always
something like this:

[https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/03/07/comcast-
xfinity-...](https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/03/07/comcast-xfinity-
paypal-net-neutrality/)

You're also forgetting Verizon's magic headers, various carriers' zero rating,
mining DNS requests, AT&T's Room 641A, and about 50 years of other charming
behavior.

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akersten
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?

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d2wa
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.

~~~
akersten
> 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?

~~~
d2wa
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.

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

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

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empath75
> 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.

~~~
ogre_codes
> 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
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...

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chadlavi
It is truly terrifying that people still use Yahoo and AOL

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trts
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
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.engadget.com/2016/10/08/reuters-yahoo-email-scanning-
done-using-a-linux-kernel-module)

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/16/yahoo_forged_cookie...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/16/yahoo_forged_cookie_hack_risk/)

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

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girst
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.

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50ckpuppet
Is the story that this is happening or that people are honestly surprised this
is happening.

~~~
IAmEveryone
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.

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ummonk
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?

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_bxg1
That'd be a problem if anybody ever used them

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Ceezy
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?

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magwa101
NOOOOO How could this be?

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

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

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Frost1x
"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.

~~~
BitwiseFool
Such an uninspired name.

~~~
d2wa
It’s an old codename for Yahoo! Search’s in-house search engine. Back in the
day when they still had one.

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scarface74
And how is this different than Google?

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

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zenexer
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
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.

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notRobot
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
No we're not.

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dksidana
even on bing ?

~~~
mtmail
epi0Bauqu is the founder of DuckDuckGo, he will know.

