Throughout the years, all search engines have taken turns denying that there is ever any hand manipulation involved when it comes to their stellar search results. At the same time, those of us who have been in the business awhile have all managed to witness what we feel are clear cut cases of hand manipulation.
In my mind, the most obvious example involved the infamous little blue pill. Viagra first hit the market in ‘98. By the end of that year, dozens of pharmaceutical affiliate programs were launched, and the pill spamming industry was born.
I don’t think you could find a single search engine that returned viagra.com as the #1 listing for the term viagra. The onslaught of pill spammers was just too great.
But things are quite different today. Now, even the worst search engine ever built doesn’t have any problem placing viagra.com in its rightful #1 spot. So what happened? Are all the search algorithms that much better, or was there a bit of human intervention involved?
It’s hard to say for sure. But I can tell you that at least as far as Google goes, the change seemed to happen literally over night, and it was a very long time before we saw similar changes in other areas receiving the same kind of abuse.
And what about Yahoo?
Yahoo is a whole different story. If you spend some time searching at the various engines that Yahoo powers, you will usually find the same basic results regardless of which interface you happen to be using. However, there are times when a portion of the results are quite different.
Here’s a quick example:
Yahoo – viagra
AltaVista – viagra
CometSearch – viagra
Notice the difference? Yahoo’s results have a few quality sites (including viagra.com in the #1 spot) listed in the top 5 that don’t seem to show up in any of their partner sites. Could it be that they simply have a "special" algorithm that they keep only for themselves that is capable of always finding the sites that people expect to see? Or is it just a case of them not realizing that denying the existence of handjobs would be a lot easier if they remembered to pass them on through to their partner sites?
I’ll let you decide!
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I recall Yahoo’s illustrious Tim Mayer making an interesting comment at SES San Jose this year. He stated that Yahoo will look through their search result and if they do not see the sites they would expect to see at the top (like GEICO and Progressive for “auto insurance�) then they would make “modifications� to get the right sites to the top.
I took this as a hint that beyond changes to the algo, there were some blatant “handjobs� going on at Yahoo. I could be wrong, but it seems to make sense.
Regarding Yahoo specifically
Jeremy Zawodny – It’s a lot easier than having random employees spam mailing lists with “who do we tell about weird web search results?” questions
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002865.html
I’m suprised that so many people at SEO Chat think that Yahoo wouldn’t have an internal system like that. Obviously, there isn’t any way to verify the authenticity of the screen capture, but I can say that if it is fake, the person who made it has been to Yahoo and seen the real version because it looks exactly like the Yahoo interface I saw when I was there last August.
I’m not that suprised, just a matter of if they have ever had a hand job before I guess. If you have, it’s apparent whether you’ve seen the interface or not.
I remember one time I had a hand job w/i the top ten results of a buzz search that was featured on the Yahoo home page. I was number 1 & 2 for the search. That day featured within the buzz results it pulled a ton of traffic – a one day total that’ll get you 1/3 way into the UPS club. I am sure Yahoo employees directly reviewed the serps and my listing. A short time later … poof. Hand job. It suprised me a bit that it wasn’t quicker/instantaneous.
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