Monday, June 28, 2010

Yahoo ignoring core users; Glitch goes unfixed for months


A couple of months ago, I e-mailed Yahoo tech support about an annoying glitch in Yahoo Finance. I received a response at the time stating that they were aware of the bug and were trying to fix it.
Fast forward to today and the glitch is still there.
Yahoo Finance is one of the web portal’s crown jewels. You’d think they’d care enough about it to fix an obvious error. But no.
I keep track of dozens of publicly traded companies as part of my day job. I group them into portfolios on Yahoo Finance to monitor stock action and news.
When I click on a portfolio, I get a grid of stock information for the companies followed by “Recent News.” At the bottom of that list of news headlines is a web link to “View More Recent News.”
If you click on “View More Recent News,” it takes you to another page of headlines. This page includes mostly headlines that were on the previous page, but that’s not the glitch to which I’m referring.
At the bottom of this second page is a link that reads “More headlines …” If you click on this link, it takes you to a blank webpage and gives you an error message in the header that reads “Request URI Too Long.” (See screenshots above.)
The fix is simple. Just delete the “More headlines” link. Because two lines lower there’s a link for “Older Headlines” that actually works.
Really. How long does it take to fix a dumb glitch like that, Yahoo?
Have you just stopped caring?

Update (7-6-10): Yahoo has fixed the glitch. It's about time.

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