this is busted
Somebody call Mark Hurst. I mistyped a query in Yahoo Weather this morning, feeding it “philadelphia, a” instead of “philadelphia, pa” and this is the result that was returned. The weather search feature didn’t fail gracefully and make suggestions or assume that I was trying to see just how hot it is right now in the City of Brotherly Love; instead it told me there was no match found. But the sponsor matches worked just fine – correctly figuring out that I was looking for Philly and offering up hotel deals and home listings.
Look, it’s obvious why the search functionality for ad placement is more advanced than that for weather forecasts – there’s more money in it, and it’s reusable across multiple applications. But from a user’s perspective this is just plain dumb. One part of the page figured out I was searching for Philadelphia, PA – but the other one couldn’t? (Posted from flickr.)