I noticed that the hyperlinks from a Yahoo search don't go directly to the
web pages, but to the yahoo site itself. I'm assuming they do this so they
can see which links the user has selected by the link going through their
proxy server. They seem to get quite an advantage from this because
technically they should know every search link people select rather than
just guessing. Does anyone know how long they have been doing this and
whether there are any publications, e.g. patents, articles on how they do
it?
I would have thought this would give them an advantage over Google who has
to just guess which link people pick. Yahoo could just keep a record of what
people select with each set of keywords and give that as search results each
time.
