Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Yahoo Being Too Helpful

This reminds me of the infamous Microsoft animated paperclip. It would auto-correct my lowercase to init-caps and then appear on the screen to ask, "Are you writing a letter?" when I was trying to write some SQL code in Word (not having a good programming editor handy) and absolutely did NOT want it to auto-correct anything.

Anyway, it used to be that regardless of where I was in the world, I had access to the US English web page (you know the default one that is just www.yahoo.com). Now the clever Yahoo folks have decided that if their location data tells them that I am connecting from Costa Rica (which I freely admit that I am), I could not possibly really want the US English language site, so they override my selection and give me espanol.yahoo.com . I tried both the Firefox and Chrome browsers. Yup, they've fixed it! No more browsing the US English site from Costa Rica.

And there is not even a visible manifestation that I can direct my anger toward. No animated paperclip, just invisible, anonymous yahooligans busily fixing what wasn't broken. Thanks but no thanks guys!

But ha! I can trick you back, by impersonating either a Canadian (ca.yahoo.com) or a British person (uk.yahoo.com) I can have my Yahoo in English. Though I am left wondering what subtle differences you yahooligans incorporate in the site for the benefit of a Canadian or a Britain that would be different if you were able to treat me as a plain old US English speaker, regardless of my geographic location.

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