This is in the 'artificial intelligence' section because it touches briefly on some of the stupidity that will contribute to the danger of melting pot ai networks.

There has been a lot of crookedness around search engines.

In the 1990s Yahoo was a successful search engine. Their main competitor was Google.

Google was known for doing some unethical things, including using hidden software to spy on browsers and get information that helped it turbo charge certain marketing strategies. Baidu, an Asian search engine, was similarly unethical.

Both Baidu and Google 'lent' their search engines to their respective political authorities for government purposes, Google eventually became an extension of the U.S. government and Baidu of the Chinese government, for surveillance, intelligence and other political purposes. But Yahoo remained more independent for a number of years.

Today, searching for something on Yahoo often leads to a completely random result.

Oftentimes the result has no relationship with the words being searched, and the search engine sometimes even adds new words that have nothing useful to do with the original search.

This is a mild example.

Several weeks ago some panthers in Florida were acting strangely. 

https://news.yahoo.com/not-seen-anything-stumbling-panthers-135404887.html

One theory involved toxic seaweed that may have been consumed by the panthers.

Searching 'panthers seaweed' produces the following result. It eliminates the word 'panther' from the search, restricts the search to results in Florida, even though Florida is not part of the search phrase, and does not even mention the panthers who may have been poisoned by seaweed in Florida.

Obviously Yahoo is not that incompetent without help from a competitor.

Is it sabotage from Google? An effort by law enforcement to steer internet searches through Google?

There is a bit more evidence,

Stay tuned.

~

A very different issue is the sabotage of Yahoo comments on articles.

Any American with at least a grade school education can read the comments on most Yahoo articles and see quickly that they are not organic public responses.

An example

https://news.yahoo.com/key-takeaways-marie-yovanovitch...

Most people don't care much either way about the impeachment story. It's not the 'interesting news' it would have been 40 years ago.

But more interesting today are the dolts who fantasize that they are steering the public by spamming comment threads with silliness that almost nobody is interested in.

This leads to a lot of comments on Yahoo articles by a low number of readers relative to other site.

In other words a site that is not overrun by ideological spammers might have 40 viewers per comment, while a heavily spammed site has much fewer.

Yahoo seems to have lent itself to this abuse and a person should ask why.