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Previous: Liberty Caskets sign | Main | Next: Women's Weight Loss location
March 16, 2006 05:20 AM
Broken: Yahoo weather lookup
This has bugged me for years. If you search Yahoo Weather for "New York, NY" - the default search if your Yahoo profile has a NYC zip code - the site asks you if you meant "New York, United States" or "New York, New York, United States" or perhaps one of several other choices. (Try it here.)
What's worse, if you click the first choice - "New York, United States" - you go to an even less helpful page asking you to "Browse for a Location." (See that here.)
Could I just get the New York weather, please?
Seems similar to a problem I have had with MapQuest I entered an adderess which MapQuest didn't recognise. The results page said (in small print) that it could not find the address but that a map of the town was available. Then it provided a link to the map of the town. the main problem is that the location of the town was indicated by the same kind of star as it uses for addresses it recognises. Therefore since I was in a hurry and didn't think to read the small print I mistook the star for my destination and got seriously lost. Google Earth does something similar but it is more obvious that it didn't find the address.
By the way the only addresses it actually seems to be able to find reliably are those in the yellow pages.
Bah... just use Wunderground. This is broken on so many levels. It seems they're trying to differentiate between NYC and NY state (with 'region' for state and 'location' for city). Don't know why they don't just say that, or why it's necessary considering you searched for NY, NY. Change that and you'll know to pick the top option if you really meant state, but then why in God's name should you have to narrow the search? You just said you wanted the whole region and not a particular location! NYC weather should come up by default, with the option to expand the map to include upstate or narrow it to just JFK or whatever. With tens of millions of potential users, you'd think they'd get this one right.
Ron Mexico says: Bah... just use Wunderground.
. . . or the National Weather Service.
It's what you're paying taxes for. Might as well use it.
It is broken, but the second part of the post makes no sense. You are clicking on the Region "hit". You want to go down to City!
Yep... or at least something similar -- July 3, '03. What makes it even better is that it's reprted as fixed.
Actually, they did fix the problem reported back in '03. The complaint back then was that searching on "new york city" didn't take you directly to the NYC weather page. Now, it does, but "new york, ny" doesn't. Neither does "new york city, ny". On the other hand, both "boston" and "boston, ma" take you right to the Boston weather page. Bizarre behaviour.
What happens if you select "New York, New York, United States?" Do you get your weather report then?
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Previous: Liberty Caskets sign | Main | Next: Women's Weight Loss location
I generally find any online form broken if you're required to specify your postal/zip code as well as your province/state. Can't someone make a form smart enough to figure it out based on your postal/zip?
Posted by: adchick at March 16, 2006 02:18 PM