Sloppy search on Yahoo!'s World Cup site
by Martin Belam, 23 June 2006
Here are some search results from the FIFA World Cup site for the word Budweiser - you'll note some of the pages have got "Budweiser Man of the Match" in the title of the documents.
So how come when I search for the phrase "Budweiser Man of the Match" I get this?
I thought search was meant to be one of Yahoo!'s core competencies?
Looks like it's the quotes that upset their script, compare and contrast:
http://search.fifaworldcup.yahoo.com/bin/search/06/en/all?p=%22news%22
http://search.fifaworldcup.yahoo.com/bin/search/06/en/all?p=news
There's also some "lovely" HTML in there. Ok sure, legacy systems are always going to rear their ugly heads from time to time - but table cell backgrounds? That's pretty impressive.
;-)
I sent a link to this posting to a friend of mine who is in Information Retrieval. He also commented that the quotes are causing the grief. He points out that the search does work if you do it from yahoo.com