Masquerading its own images as "fresh" or "HQ" placing them above the relevant results

Jun 21, 2012 13:24 GMT  ·  By
The "Y! HQ" box actually leads to images from Yahoo not high quality images from the web, as you'd expect
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   The "Y! HQ" box actually leads to images from Yahoo not high quality images from the web, as you'd expect

Yahoo is updating its image and video search engines, across all platforms, and is boasting about several new features. The look of the results pages has been revamped with an emphasis on the visual aspects, the thumbnails for the image results are now bigger and better positioned and videos have a preview box.

Another big change is the Yahoo HQ "filter" for photo and video results that, supposedly, enables users to find better quality images and videos.

There is also the ability to go full screen when viewing either photo or video results. Yahoo has been moving towards this for a while, and it's not the only one, results that are more visual and more immersive.

"Today, we are taking Yahoo! Image Search and Video Search to an eye-catching new level. Through an extension of our partnership with Getty Images and some reengineering (and redesigning) of our multimedia search experiences, we are delivering a more timely experience, supported by the most recent, and often never-seen-before content," Yahoo wrote.

One of the things Yahoo is most excited about is a new partnership with Getty Images which, apparently, will get Getty photos into Yahoo search results faster than ever, to ensure that the freshest images, for news and events, is available as fast as possible.

On the face of it, the upgrade is reasonably interesting. There are a few problems though with some of the features, not technical ones but more "ethical" in nature.

The Yahoo HQ filters are now prominently placed on many search results. In fact, the very first result, with a thumbnail four times as large as the regular ones, points to a collection of images that are at least 1024x768 in size. Yahoo says that this is a great way for users to find better quality images.

What Yahoo doesn't say, though, is that all of those images come from Yahoo properties and are placed there solely based on that virtue and not because they rank better than the organic results. In some cases, the first two rows of results all come from Yahoo.

But there's no way of knowing that. The first result is simply labeled "Y! HQ images" which anyone would interpret as HQ Images, as in images that are high quality, but are otherwise organic results just like the rest of the images on the page.

"For images, the HQ badge identifies photos with at least 2 megapixels and a 1024 x 768 aspect ratio," Yahoo describes the feature. But you'll be hard pressed to find it on any image that does not originate from Yahoo.

It's even worse with "recent images." Yahoo pushes these images to the top of the results. They're marked as being taken in the last few hours or perhaps a day ago. Again, the very first result is simply labeled as "latest images" which, again, any regular user would understand as being, well, "latest images" not "latest images from Yahoo" which is what they are.

All of the images that are marked as being fresh come from Yahoo, yet the company doesn't make any attempt to indicate that those images are from its own properties and not from the greater web.

Google is getting sued and investigated by antitrust and competition regulators for this very thing. The difference is, Google never added links to its own properties in the organic results artificially. The Google Maps box, the news box, weather, finance and so on are all separated and clearly observable as not "organic" search results.

With Yahoo's search share dropping month after month, it would probably be a good idea to try and offer better search results rather than try to mislead users and funnel them back to its own properties. On the other hand, if Yahoo has given up on search entirely, doing anything to prop up its other products, even if it means a faster death for search, is perhaps the best it can do.

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The "Y! HQ" box actually leads to images from Yahoo not high quality images from the web, as you'd expect
The first two rows are all images from Yahoo and some are clearly less relevant than the organic results, i.e. they don't even show Obama
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