How to exploit publication bias in the Google / Yahoo tie-up

News from TechCrunch today that Google's lawyers are ringing up Google & Yahoo search customers and asking them to support the tie-up.

Of course, one must assume that the plan is to then present as public testimonial only the handful of people who are willing to go on the record as supporting the deal. An elementary bit of data distortion by publication bias.

Which raises a reasonably interesting opportunity for anyone who opposes the deal and wants to demonstrate instead that it is also opposed by many major clients of the two search engines - find the people who said "no" to Google's call, and compare the numbers to the "yes" votes that the lawyers eventually manage to scrape together.

(To add insult to injury, think for a moment what the easiest way to find those respondents will be. Search advertising really does work and for something so specific with no obvious commercial application the keywords should be dirt cheap.)

Comments

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That's the thing about search vs. newspaper advertising.
You buy ads for some google/yahoo deal keywords and hope those who said no search for something related. Tough luck!
Or you can buy a first page ad in a few national papers or in lots of local ones and people will see it searching or not.