Hand-edited Results in Yahoo Point To Algo Failure

There have been suspicions for months that Yahoo has been hand-editing results for competitive search terms, however I recently stumbled across a pair of search terms that essentially prove that these suspicions have foundation.

When searching for a particular popular commerical single word search term (over 400K searches a month, according to the Overture keyword tool) and a two-word related term (66K a month), the top 10 results are *exactly* identical.

Well, not only are the odds of this happening extremely unlikely, but reversing the two-word search term (33K a month), not one of those top ten results is in the top 20. In fact, the results are pretty darn... "spammy" - cloaked pages, keyword stuffing, shady redirects, the works.

Yahoo has never claimed to exclusively use algorithmic solutions like Google does, but it begs the question - Are human-edited results on such a vast scale viable? Sure, Yahoo has a whole staff of professional editors from the Yahoo Directory just waiting for those $299 directory submissions to trickle in, so it certainly makes sense to occupy them improving the Y! search experience and knock out the bad results, or, as it appears, actually selecting the top 5 or 10 results.

But what happens if the top ranked site changes hands or content, as often happens in the internet world? How will these hand-edits withstand the test of time? Let's see what these Yahoo hand-picked serps look like in 6-12 months, if, in fact, these sites are "permanently" lodged in the top 5, as people have suggested.

All in all, I suspect that Yahoo's decision to hand-pick search results is a short-term fix. In the end, even though Yahoo's results for high visibility search terms are very good, I believe that the volume of overall search terms makes their manual adjustment of the search results untenable. Yahoo's hand-picked results do not, nor could they ever, extend to the tens of millions of search terms that constitute the Long Tail of Search, and that is where Google and MSN's use of automatic algorithmic solutions will ultimately prevail.