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Mon. Feb 22, 2010

Goodbye Yahoo

Over three years ago, I wrote a little open letter to Yahoo, “Lost In The Yahoo Desert”:

I know I don’t visit you very much. Not like some others. But you have this one page I like to visit, the “Most Viewed” News page. No, I’m not going to link it. Because it is virtually guaranteed that you’ll just change the link.

You see, today is the third time I’ve woken up to do a little morning news surfing and found that page gone. Poof. No redirect or forward to the page’s new location. No 404. Just an ugly dead end, redirected to a broken page.

The third time.

This is Web 101. When you create a popular page and prominently place the link on your site, you’ve created an obligation. Your readers will bookmark that page, returning to it every day (that is your goal, isn’t it?). It is your obligation to make sure they still get there.

For the third time, you’ve left me in the desert. With no water, and no map.

You’ve been around longer than most, certainly long enough to know better. So here’s the deal I made with myself this morning (since you’re the non-present partner): the next time the “Most Viewed” News page disappears … so do I.

Can you guess what happened this weekend? Sure you can. Page gone. Poof. “Article not found or expired on Yahoo! News”

For the fourth time.

Yes, I know where the new page is. It’s actually now at a more semantic URL, one that might actually work for quite some time (the old one was just a letter/number jumble, http://news.yahoo.com/ms/1776 ).

That’s not the point. The point is that your old URL should redirect automagically to the new one. It’s done via your .htaccess file with a 301 Redirect. But you know that. You’ve got lots more technical smarts than I do.

You’ve simply chosen not to use them.

For the fourth time.

So I’m going to keep my deal with myself. I’ll use Google News, or CBS News, or ABC News, or one of the other options you recommend on the search page the old URL now brings you to.

Because, after being a web entity for about 15 years, at the most basic level (a URL), you still don’t understand or respect how the web works.