Picking up on a post from Danah Boyd last week, a number of search-news sites are reporting on how Google has stopped including Yahoo and Mapquest sources in the “OneBox” list of links that it puts at the top of searches on addresses. The only link now is to Google Maps. Wrote Boyd:

This infuriates me because there’s a reason that i don’t use Google Maps. Their directions are *atrocious* AND you can’t copy/paste the directions once you have them. And it completely pisses me off that the “email” button tries to email me a link not the content of the page … I realize that this is a subtle thing but it really makes me quite unhappy. Plus, i’d always touted Google’s willingness to link to both Yahoo Maps and Mapquest as a sign that not every search company has to focus on being a silo. Google broke that today, signaling that it does indeed prefer to be a silo than to offer choice that the consumer might want.

Google Blogoscope has before and after images showing how OneBox map results have been transformed from an information source to a house ad. The new Google practice contradicts the company’s promotion of OneBox as an unbiased information tool aimed at increasing the relevance of search results: “Google’s search technology finds many sources of specialized information. Those that are most relevant to your search are included at the top of your search results. Typical OneBox results include news, stock quotes, weather and local websites related to your search.” So much for “many sources.”

In a November 2006 interview with Search Engine Watch, Google Product Marketing Director Debbie Jaffe stressed that the contents of OneBoxes are drawn from many sources based solely on the information’s relevance to the user: “These web search features provide a quick and easy way to connect users with results that are relevant to their query … Google has always been committed to providing the best answers to users’ questions. This includes creating a simple, but powerful, user experience that connects users to highly relevant answers. This feature is an example of this as users can [find] the answers immediately for certain queries so they don’t have to search through each of the search results … The [OneBox] search results are algorithmically determined and are from various sources.” So the algortihm just up and decided that the only “relevant” map source was Google and that it could get rid of Mapquest and Yahoo Maps? That’s a wily algorithm.

This seems of a piece with Google’s attempt to pass off house ads as “tips” a while back, directly contradicting its earlier claim that “our ads are created and managed under the exact same guidelines, principles, practices and algorithms as the ads of any other advertiser.”

“The goals of the advertising business model,” wrote Larry Page and Sergey Brin a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, “do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.” They continued: “Search engine bias is particularly insidious.” Little did they know they were predicting their own corruption. Then again, I suppose you could always argue that “relevance” is a subjective term.