Yahoo a bit code-challenged?
I saw a bizarre thing while searching on Yahoo today. After entering my query, I pressed the big ol’ “Web search” button… and got results for a totally different term, “Enter City Name”.
I *think* I can see what’s happened - there’s a Yahoo Travel box on the home page, prepopulated with “Enter City Name”… can you see where this is leading?
It looks as though someone hasn’t tested the code for that Travel search box, and it’s “interfering” with the main search results by appending an additional paramter / value pair to ANY query string, “&p=Enter+City+Name”. It seems Yahoo’s rendering process reads the last &p= p /v pair to decide what results to display, sooooo… anything I search comes back as though I’d searched “Enter City Name”.
Is it just me, or is Yahoo broken? More embarassingly, is it just an HTML error? I’m going to go look now.
UPDATE : I trimmed some screenshots. Here’s the yahoo.com page, with the offending Travel content box
… and here’s an example of the output I was getting. Note the “&p=Enter+City+Name” that has been added to the URL
I located this line of code in the HTML from the Yahoo home page :
input name=p class=”guide” id=”srch” value=”Enter City Name” onFocus=”remInput();” onBlur=”checkInput();”
As it’s getting a bit late (or early, if you see what I mean), I can’t quite be bothered to confirm it’s the culprit, but I think it might be. It’s a search input with the same name as the main search box, which could cause it’s contents to be appended to the query string. I dunno, I’ll go ask a search engineer.
Later. Much, much later