Tues News: 10/20 (Bad Idea Edition)

Michael Block | October 20th, 2009

Homestar, going on the Riverquest Safariventure may have been the worst three thousand bucks you've ever spent!

They say that there are no stupid questions. Chances are, if you have a question and you think it’s stupid there are ten other people in the room wondering the same thing. This axiom, however, doesn’t hold true for ideas. With ideas, there are good ideas and bad ideas and very little in between. We’ve all had bad ideas in the past (I once tried to wall mount a TV and hide the wires in the wall by myself; guess how that ended) and the best thing to do is to try and learn from them. Well, as it turns out, we aren’t alone; the big three search engines have bad ideas as well.

In today’s edition of the Tues News, we’ll explore some of the recent bad ideas that Google, Yahoo and MSN have had. Some of these are real doozies:

Undoubtedly, you’ve heard of YouTube. What you may or may not be aware of, though, is that the absolute worst things you’ll ever read are found in YouTube comments. It’s like the bathroom wall of the Internet. Has it been a while since you’ve seen the n-word in print? Head over to YouTube and check the comments; I’m sure it won’t take you long. Do you enjoy reading misinformed but staunch and ardent opinions about important and unimportant issues alike? Head over to YouTube! Do you like improper spelling, grammar and syntax? YouTube; head over there. Anyway, Google, which owns YouTube, thinks it would be a good idea to test out YouTube comment search. YouTube comments are the absolute dregs of the Internet and this is a really bad idea. My guess is that the best function of this search feature will be to teach kids new and more colorful swear words. [SearchEngineLand]
Have you ever tried to get to Google and typed wwwgooogle.com instead of www.google.com? A lot of people make that mistake and, because of this, most companies own the version of their domain that includes the “www” without the first “dot.” In fact, if you clicked on that wwwgoogle.com link, you’ll notice that you just get forwarded to Google. Well, Microsoft made a really bad decision and didn’t buy wwwbing.com and because of this oversight, a troll is now sitting on the domain… literally. This is bad news for MSN, which has spent over $100M on marketing Bing. Some of that traffic is definitely going to the Walter Will Wawrinka Bing fan site and forgetting all about trying out the new MSN search engine. [TechCrunch]
When discussing bad ideas, it’s inevitable that Yahoo is going to be dragged into the conversation. The poor folks over at Yahoo have had a rough couple of years. Yahoo launched a major interface redesign without incorporating their international accounts. Yahoo turned down a Microsoft deal only to approve a deal with Microsoft a year later that seems less likely to challenge Google’s supremacy. Yahoo declared that they were not a search engine only to launch $100M marketing campaign (lot of these going around, huh?) where it seems unclear as to what Yahoo actually is at this point. But none of these are the bad idea that I planned to write about. No, Yahoo recently had the idea to hire lap dancers for Hack Day. This would be a bonehead and risky move for almost any company nowadays, however, in the already male-dominated tech industry, marginalizing women is taken all the more seriously. It doesn’t exactly send the right message when a sizable chunk of the female attendees are being paid to flirt with the programmers. [Business Insider]

The last thing that anyone should do in the face of such a sexist act by Yahoo is CHECK OUT THE PICTURES but, alas, I can’t stop you if you’re a chauvinist pig. Thanks for stopping by. Read up on and keep up with the online world; keep reading Tues News! Catch ya later!

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