Ok. I’m probably missing something really obvious, but while everyone’s talking about how Yahoo! have now relaunched their search without Google and while everyone’s debating whether it’s better now or not, why has no one commented on the really really obvious failing of Yahoo? That failing being, of course, that when you go to their bloody site your cursor isn’t automatically in the search box!? It takes me twice as long to search for something on Yahoo as it does on Google and involves me fiddling with my trackpad. What an idiot design decision (and such a simple one to fix).
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3 replies on “One tiny tweak on Yahoo!”
Well, it seems that using IE (on the PC at least) the cursor is automaticallly placed in the search box, although it isn’t when using Firebird.
Before I checked, I thought that one explanation could be that Yahoo! have done this on purpose so that users are forced to spend a few moments longer at their portal. With Google, the focus is the search engine. At Yahoo! they want you to read all their lovely advert- I mean content, with the search being just one option for finding what you’re after.
Yeah I thought this might be the case. It seemed like it was too unlikely that they wouldn’t do something like that, except it’s a bit of a statement of slack online behaviour for a major search engine not to let its most important page (of the two basically important ones) cater properly for alternative browsers. Still, I should have checked with my PC using friends first.
On the other hand, overriding the browser’s default behaviour like this isn’t that great if you want to use Mozilla’s Find As You Type — if I start typing when the page has loaded, expecting to jump to a link somewhere on it, I realise my typing is all ending up in the search box. Very annoying, although I realise that in the real world this affects almost no people, and I am used to the behaviour on Google – I’m just showing there’s another side of the coin.