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Lycos: Can't Get There From Here
rockville writes "I found this from Robot Wisdom, then I tried it myself: when you search Lycos for Excite, Yahoo, or Infoseek, you get a pretty strange result " I guess I can understand the reasons behind doing that, but it still feels kinda wrong. What do you think?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Apparently lycos didn't pay itself enough money to get search results on its own page....
click here to search for yahoo on lycos You get their page asking you to please consider them first. Read through as tears come to your eyes. Then- after they're done pitching to you, they finally say, basically: "Okay, if you still want to search for Yahoo on Lycos, click here. Guess where this link takes you? Read through again as tears come to your eyes....
If Lycos didn't include the link, then I can see people complaining about it, but since they do include a direct link to Infoseek/Excite/Yahoo at the bottom of the page, so I don't really see anything wrong with this.
Besides, any dip who can't figure out that yahoo is located at yahoo.com, or infoseek at infoseek.com, deserves what they get.
Conclusion: there is nothing to get your panties in a knot about here. The actions of Lycos aren't harmful or menancing.
Um, what if I don't? Do I get my money back?
Kinda reminds me of the Google search for 'More evil than satan himself'... anyway, how many times have you seen some clueless newbie go to Yahoo and type 'www.porn.com' or something in the search field? I guess lycos' move only makes sense... search engines trying to second guess the user is nothing new, this is just a vivid example.
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
A study of AltaVista's logs for August 1998 showed that "yahoo" was the 7th most popular query over a period of a few weeks. It seems kind of dumb for Lycos to do that, but on the other hand they are probably catching a lot of hits that way. There are quite a few people new to the web who don't know any better.
- Russ
I suppose it is in a company's interest to not support their competition, but this is a bit much. Or is it? Would it be reasonable for, say, the New York Times to write about the New York Post? Does that ever happen? (I can't say, I live in Alabama...). Or does the phone book mention competing phone companies? I would think so.
I wonder if such directory services are legally bound to represent information like this accurately -- clearly they aren't here, and it's easy to understand why, but how far can they carry it? If one advertiser doesn't like site so and so, will they block it from listings? This starts butting up on some important issues pretty quickly when you get into such matters. Is blocking access to a document a suppression of first amendment free speech rights? Good question...
Of course if we all just used Google to begin with, this problem might not happen in the first place. But that's just my unofficial, third-party, no-name endorsement of their fine service...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Search engines are such a part of the fabric of the internet that they've become taken for granted; you use them without really thinking about them. I for one have always assumed that they were agnostic in that they only analzyed your request in terms of finding matching pages. What's actually revealed here is they are analyzing the content of your request as well. This is chilling.
What other keywords are they looking for? What are they doing behind the scenes when presented with these keywords? I don't consider myself to be a privacy zealot but things like this make me wonder whether we truly know the internet as much as we think we do.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
But don't you think this could a disturbing precedent? Part of the appeal of the web is the "you CAN get there from here" mentality. And you should be able to do it without getting preached at. Sure, this is probably harmless- but think about the way media companies tend to operate- I bet that within a decade or so, if major regulatory efforts aren't made (and they probably wont be) most major search engines will have parent company owners. Lycos could easily end up part of Viacom. When searching for another media company on Lycos, would you really want a sales pitch thrown back at you, and a long maze to navigate before finding your link? This is another rumble of something big- will the ethos of the web survive under corporate ownership? If the journalistic integrity of most modern multinational/subsidiary/commercial press orgs is any indication- it'll definately suffer FAIR ain't the best themselves, but they have the right idea...
In philosophy and law, there's the concept of "content neutrality". To condense it down to its core, it basically means that busineses and structures don't care *what* they're working with; they merely work with whatever the customer provides.
In computing terms, most processes that take data in from a pipe are content neutral--it doesn't matter what you toss into mmencode, or tr, or mail. The apps perform a function on content--whatever that content happens to be is irrelevant.
The key to Content Neutrality is consistency. It's not enough to merely be "sometimes" or "usually" neutral.
Content Neutrality forms the protective construct in law that insulates from liability, for example, web site providers for the contents of their customer's web pages, email providers for the words and possible contraband relayed blindly over their networks, and telephone companies from being liable for bomb threats made over their lines.
If web site providers constantly monitor any of their sites, they're liable to constantly monitor all of them. The same goes for voice and email providers, who would quickly go out of business if they had to make sure no contraband speech passed over their lines. Telephone providers do not monitor any lines for contraband--that's not their job. Making sure a line exists is.
Content Neutrality gives the information industry it's primary shield against those who would exploit their infrastructure to blindly suppress both the criminal and the innocent.
Content Neutrality is also the only thing protecting the entire search engine industry from instant extinction.
What happens if I find a kiddie porn site through Google(as far as I can tell, it can find anything)?) What happens when some 12 year old kid at the local library finds www.whitehouseinterns.com off Yahoo? Or when anyone picks a song off of mp3.lycos.com? (Half of the Lycos employees who are reading this just went ghost pale.)
By preventing searches for site competitors from bringing up standard spider results, Lycos is accepting the role of gatekeeper, verifying that users aren't going to be led anywhere they shouldn't be led.
This Is Not A Position Lycos Wants To Be In!!!
Such a precedent means that Lycos would have to proactively verify the age of those who find sex sites through their search engine--after all, young children shouldn't be led to X rated sites. It means that Lycos could be held responsible for guiding people to fan sites--after all, illicit photography scanned from magazines should not be republished. Anything and everything Lycos does would have to go through an insurmountable gauntlet of legal checks before a return could be allowed, all because Lycos chose to sacrifice their content neutrality for the sirens of market share and myopia.
This is no joke. Content Neutrality is the reason why you can call MCI via AT&T Long Distance and ask them to change your service, rather then having your call redirected to a Ma Bell hard sell sales associate.
Somebody needs to slap Lycos's lawyers around a bit--someone fell asleep at the wheel.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
After not noticing that I'd been automatically redirected to the German Lycos site, and finding that I could find German Yahoo, Infoseek and so on, I wondered what all the fuss was about.
I then confirmed the "humorous messages" effect by going here US Lycos.
Are the people in America having fun, or are they being misguided.
Regards
J Williamson
Long long ago, in a different job, I used FrameMaker. It marked "InterLeaf" and "PageMaker" (competing DP software) as spelling mistakes and offered "FrameMaker" as the "correct" alternative. I believe that at least one of the other two also did this.
---- Backwards compatible -- If it's not backwards it's not compatible
More likely to be just a database error. The message above does sonnd very database like.
Perhaps you should email them reporting the problem instead of blindly attacking them.
I seriously doubt lycros could convice enough people to give them money to be on the search engine. They would have about 100 sites on the entire database if this was the case.
What they are doing is probably a bad idea all the same (see content neutrality a few comments back)
My 5cents (since they got rid of 2c pieces)
If he's fucking you in the ass, then technically, he's still filling your cavity.
What a disappointment Lycos has become. I remember when it was a project of the CS department at Carnegie-Mellon, when it was without competition as the best place to find information on the Internet. Since they went commercial, they've gone down the tubes. (I don't believe that has to happen when you've gone commercial, but it sure did happen to Lycos.)
Those of you who are saying that you understand what Lycos is doing don't convince me. Lycos asserts on its "don't go to Infoseek" page that it's the best search engine around. Why don't they just cut the crap and prove it with quality? To me, that means giving the user what he or she asked for.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
Google doesn't seed their results. This has been explained here many many times before. They are not doing the same thing. It's simply a weird emergent behaviour of their search algorithms.
----
Morning gray ignites a twisted mass of colors shapes and sounds
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
Google is good for most things. But it isn`t that great if the thing you`re looking for is quite obscure, because it goes by the number of pages linked to it. If it`s obscure, there won`t be that many links, and so it`ll get a lower rating.
Someone might also want to inform our good
friends over at Google about this.
It is hard to justify "worst operating system"
coming up with www.microsoft.com. Especially
when I think only the word operating is on the
page.
The same is also with "best operating system"
coming up with linux.com
Also "more evil than satan" also takes you through
to microsoft.com.
Sure this is funny and all but why is this any
different to the Lycos case.
Your post is more unintentionally relevant than you might think.
According to Google's scans, Microsoft is more closely associated with people writing on their web pages "worst operating system" than anyone else. Similarly, Linux gets the best operating system treatment.
Google is not a dumb engine--instead of merely rating by what's on the page, it rates by how people refer to the contents *of* the page. This is an incredibly cheap way to "borrow" intelligence from systems that can process complex information neurologically(human brains) and insert it into systems that can only marginally approximate that kind of intelligence.
Google executes its intelligence gathering in a Content Neutral manner, thus insulating it from any libel/slander that might result from returning certain values. Because Google didn't rig the system to have it return Microsoft as More Evil Than Satan, it's not their fault that that was the top hit.
If, however, Google removed that response, they'd be responsible for removing every response that could possibly be interpreted as slanderous. Note, this isn't the same as changing the algorithm to be more accurate--this is programming a specific "don't return this".
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
When you ask Google "What the best search engine in the world?", it replies:
Hmmm.. I'll bet that after the next scan, Google comes up first on that list. I'll just say that I've seen a lot of links that look like:
Google! - The best search engine in the world!
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
By preventing searches for site competitors from bringing up standard spider results, Lycos is accepting the role of gatekeeper, verifying that users aren't going to be led anywhere they shouldn't be led.
That's not what Lycos is doing at all. They are doing the same thing they do with any query, using the information at their disposal to come up with what they think the best solution to the user's query will be.
In the specified case, Lycos has more context than it normally does, and so it knows that the query specifies a search engine, thus it can provide what it believes to be reasonable answers to the query.
Lycos is not deciding that given target X, the user should NOT go there. It is deciding that given target X, the best place to go would be lycos (but it doesn't keep you from going to infoseek yourself, and even provides a link).
To take a quote from your post, they merely work with whatever the customer provides. Lycos takes the query (provided by the customer) and matches it to webpages based on the content of those webpages. I admit that the matching in this case is inconsistent, because it bases its decision on "known content" instead of "content from the webpage context", but it still starts from the user's request for said content.
Using your definition, there is no way for any search engine to be content neutral, because every result they provide is based on the examined content of the page.
Dave.
If IE ever reaches "critical mass", you'll see Microsoft removing the "use current page as start page".
;)
Then msn.com will be integrated with the OS. They're inseperable.
It gets worse. Wait till the URL input disappears. You'll only be able to go to URL's using some sort of integrated "meta-URL" junk through a web form.
And to be fair, I worry about Netscape doing the same thing.
I'm SO glad Netscape released the Mozilla source when they did. I seriously doubt an inhuman corporation like AOL would ever have done that...
Then, what exactly is this link for?
Lycos seems to say, "We know about everything, we just won't tell you!"
-AP
You have drawn analogies between Lycos and phone companies that are quite inappropriate.
Lycos will tell you up front that they are NOT simply a conduit of information. They are a content provider. They deliberate and often shape what you see when you are at their site. When you go to Lycos to search for something, they deliberately steer you on the basis of what you are looking for. The ads you see are different, the services they offer change, all because of what you are looking for.
They have a search engine that runs largely without human intervention, but that is only part of what they do. They absolutely provide content. It definitely is not neutral.
Lycos is not in the business of coughing up a few links that you might or not click on. They want you to stay, to browse, to buy. That is a far cry from providing copper, fiber, and power.
Now that we've set that precident... I need to get out there and brush up all the old cons and scams.
"Yes, your Honor, I would like to point out to the court that the scam I was using was obvious and only GULLIBLE people fall for it."
Judge glares at the DA Attorney. "Yes, yes... you're quite right, young man. I have NO idea why this case was even brought to me. Case dismissed!"
Well. I'm not a search engine expert. So I went to some experts to find out. In the interest of brevity, I kept it to two of the affected Lycos competitors: Yahoo and Infoseek. Hit the links and see how THEY handle Lycos.
Amazing. Its what I would expect of a search engine/ web listing/ portal: easy to follow listings pertaining to the site I was interested in. No sales pitches. No confusing links. Just the info I need.
How refreshing.