May 30, 2007
Internet censorship seems to be a rather far-fetched issue until it actually affects you directly and personally.
I admit I do things that make a lot of people angry and this time it seems Yahoo! Inc itself decided to get angry with me! I perfectly well know why as my post on Yahoo handcrafting describing exactly how Yahoo! employees fiddle with your seach results clearly annoyed some of them as it was their own stupidity that allowed this information to leak out to the publc domain.
Now they are making some effort attempting to stop it from spreading - all feeds from my website lzzr.com had been blocked in Yahoo! Pipes and effectively censored out. No more Yahoo Pipes for LZZR.com!
Of course they are in their own right as it is their service and they are to decide which feeds to allow to Yahoo! Pipes and which to block out. I am not in a position to deny them this right. Neither I am in a position to deny them their right to act stupid. It’s been prooven too many times that repressive measures like censoring information resources you don’t like always results in an opposite effect! It gets spread by other channels and tends to snowball at each revolution.
Hopefully this is not the official policy of Yahoo! Inc as I don’t believe their top management is stupid enough to ruin their new project by introducing selective censorship. Most likely it is a personal revenge of a certain Yahoo! employee whose actions resulted in leakage of sensitive information. I have reasons to believe this person had to go through some hard times as a result of this blunder. Now this individual seems to be making another mistake.
On the other hand I may be wrong and somewhere at the top level of Yahoo! there is a clear policy of cutting out websits publishing information that is not exactly favoured by Yahoo. Not surprising and equally stupid considering the fact that Yahoo Inc attitudes towards censorship once already resulted in an enormous PR disaster when in 2005 Yahoo collaborated with Communist China helping Chinese authorities to imprison a journalist for 10 years. Shi Tao, a reporter who worked for the Contemporary Business News nwespaper in China was found guilty of sending foreign-based websites the text of an internal Communist Party message. At this time Yahoo! was accused by Western media of providing Chinese investigating organs with information that helped link Shi Tao’s personal e-mail account and the text of the message to his computer.
Allow me a quote from BBC News website:
“We already knew that Yahoo! collaborates enthusiastically with the Chinese regime in questions of censorship, and now we know it is a Chinese police informant as well,” Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.
So, it may well be that Yahoo! Inc simply likes censorship policies since Yahoo! record on sensorship looks rather consistent - from acting as a Chinese police informant to censoring their owns search results and individual websites.
tags: shi tao, yahoo, yahoo pipes, blunder, censorship, internet, policy, scandal, search results
Posted by LZZR under SEO Ethics, Yahoo | Comments (5)
February 18, 2007
In my post Yahoo delivers Hand Crafted results too I already hinted on a fact that Yahoo uses hand-job on their results. By the time of writing I only had rumours to rely on, today a hard-proof is at hand.
This screenshot published on Flickr by a rather unthoughtful Yahoo employee gives us the following:
Yahoos: Report bad results or ads Bucket test : M002
Not only it confirms all previous suspicions but also gives us some clues about Yahoo internal policies. Note, the verb Report is hyperlinked and the text itself urges Yahoos (a sidenote: what a humiliating nickname for their very own employees to accept, or perhaps Yahoo management assumes they are not literate enough to remember one rather important Irish writer of XVIII century, I’ll write a separate post on this later) to report not only bad results but also bad ADS.
Even in the early days of my SEO career I always believed that it would be silly for search engines not to use some sort of human check or handcrafting, if you will. Hence I am surprised that many including very much respected Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Watch as well as even more respected Threadwatch community so stubbornly refuse to believe that handcrafting is a normal practice going on all the time (while you sleep 
). Here you get it - not only SEPRs could be considered BAD but ads as well, that’s how far automatic ad placement goes in reality. Wake up and rise to the challenge - handcrafting isn’t a myth it’s a bloody reality!
Concerning the authenticity: I will not provide a direct URL of the source but anyone can easily find it on FLICKR. I wouldn’t want to grass up the person to Yahoo. However I believe this to be genuine and interestingly the screenshot itself is accompanied by the following note:
This word clitoris got into our list of keywords for Yahoo! Health so I searched to see if we actually had any content on it. It just happened to be that a coworker came by at that very moment and saw my query box & I had to explain…
As I understand the individual from whom this originates is one of those copywriters or however they call these people planted inside Yahoo communities and being paid to provide content for Yahoo portal system on the variety of subjects (clitoris included). Why this clitoris job was given to this particular person I can only guess but most likely since this person is considered to be the most knowledgable on the subject by the line management. More interesting however is the bit about Bucket test unfortunately nothing is revealed about this and I may only speculate that it could be some sort of a case identifier. Usually bucket testing associates with pool leaks and inasmuch as this screenshot is not deliberately leaked to provoke a scandal in SEO community, it serves as a hard proof for all our suspicions.
tags: lzzr, seo, serp, ads, bucket test, clitoris, communities, copywriter, genuine, hand crafted results, hand job, hard proof, scandal, suspicion, yahoo
Posted by LZZR under SEO Ethics, Yahoo | Comments (5)
February 10, 2007
As I noticed elsewhere already, Yahoo had gone crazy. Now it seems it’s a deliberate strategy. It looks like they’ve got offended by Google’s near-monopoly and decided to aid those who are more than happy to exhaust Googlebot and Google spam-filters with millions of pages of duplicate content.
First Yahoo makes their Y360 blog service to compulsory re-publish content in their Geocities blog, and now this!
They just released Yahoo Pipes a service that allows you to mash up any number of feed sources and get them out as a new combined feed they call a pipe. Being a pipe smoker myself I can’t help appreciating their naming convention, despite they actually derive it from Unix pipes, not from smoking ones. I simply stick with my interpretation.
Put it in your pipe, burn it and smoke it!
That’s what is on offer and what makes it the ultimate splogging tool. Get any kind of syndicated content, mix and mash it in pipes and here you go. You only need to have basic wordpress skills and a couple of good plugins to make a perfect splog. So splogging for everyone, splogging for the masses!
I don’t mind, but what is going to happen to the unique content mantra of recent days. With this tool you can dilute anybody’s unique content in three clicks.
It’s not that I am not appreciating the effort. It’s easy and fun working with their fancy Web 2.0 interface and making all those pipes connect in a nice drainage system. I felt like a real plumber at work. You have to try it to enjoy it! I even made my own combined feed and loaded it to a eSEO test site.
Get a nice screenshot of their interface:
tags: google, googlebot, lzzr, seo, yahoo pipes, bseo, eseo, pipe, plugin, smoking, spam, splog, unique content, wordpress, yahoo
Posted by LZZR under Yahoo | Comments (3)
