William Reardon’s Blog

As most of you know, despite bearing four children who worth with computers, my mom doesn’t really ride the cutting edge of technology. To give you a hint, she still sometimes searches for old emails that have a link for websites she wants to return to. She uses IM, but only because it’s already setup for her.

Last night mom IM’ed me, mentioning it was raining pretty bad back in the Midwest, and wondered what the weather would be like that weekend. You can’t really say “google it” to mom, and since my My Yahoo includes the weather for hometown, I simply got the Yahoo weather page for Joliet & sent it to her.

In a very mom way, mom replied she already knew it was raining & didn’t need the computer to tell her that. I replied it had the forecast. She replied that she was wondering what it was in Rochester, MN, where she’s traveling this weekend for a conference. (Something she had told me on several previous phone calls. Bad son, I know.)

I tell her Yahoo can find the weather for any city, and all she has to do is search for it. After trying, she says it doesn’t work. So I re-open my browser, and search yahoo for “rochester, mn weather”, it shows up as expected, and I send her another link. In mom fashion, she thanks me.

A bit later, a thought popped into my question. Was it mom? Or was it Yahoo?

I returned to yahoo.com and repeated my search.

As expected and as before, I got the weather. Good.

But what if I click through & try to search for weather on Yahoo! weather?

Yep, that’s right. I was too quick to blame mom.

Using defaults, if you search for weather on the Yahoo homepage it works.

Do the same on Yahoo! weather — i.e., search for weather on Yahoo! weather — and it doesn’t.

And that, my friends, is stupid.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 8:25 pm and is filed under nerd-ness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.