A New Horizon for Verizon: Swizzled Search Results
March 19, 2020
DarkCyber read “Yahoo, AOL, OneSearch Results Biased in Favor of Parent Company Verizon Media’s Web Sites.” The main idea seems to be that like baker’s in 11th century France a thumb on the scales could pay dividends. A gram here, a gram there.
The article asserts:
You may not be surprised to learn that the search results from all three of Verizon Media’s search engines are biased in favor of Verizon Media websites. Yahoo!, AOL, and OneSearch all boosts the ranking of Verizon Media brands in organic search results. That is to say, regular web results excluding ads, news, shopping, image, and video search results.
Surprised? Nope. What is the bit of revelatory factoid is that Bing indexes the Verizon content. Neither Bing nor Google reveals exactly how many Web sites their respective systems index. Useless information like how many links the crawlers follow in a Web site is not made explicit.
DarkCyber’s test queries suggest that Bing indexes only sites with a higher probability of being clicked. We have noted that for some queries, the Bing results closely parallel Google’s. Bing search administrators, are you monitoring Mother Google?
Therefore, such a happy coincidence that Bing indexes and displays in a favorable position the Verizon owned sites. In the good old days, the approach was called hit boosting. Today it probably has the words artificial intelligence and semantic technology obfuscating shaping content to meet a specific business need.
Progress in search? Absolutely just search engine optimization, however.
Stephen E Arnold, March 19, 2020
https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/verizon-media-search.html
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
