A Bad Time for Yahoo! to Look Bad

Perhaps Yahoo! is not doing that well financially because the services they offer are just not very good and sometimes are just plain dumb.  My latest amusement from Yahoo! News came from my decision to check out a story with the tempting headline “Home Bought for $1 Threatened by Foreclosure,” which Yahoo! actually picked up for NBC Chicago, which apparently got it from AOL Real Estate.  The story was a bit deceptive, since the house actually was mortgaged to pay for all the work that needed to be done on it;  and there was an “Editor’s Note” at the bottom with an update from NBC Chicago that gave the story a happier ending.   

As usual, however, my beef with Yahoo! concerned their list of “related content,” as shown in this screen shot:

None of this has anything to do with the economic crisis or its impact on home ownership.  It only has to do with the appearance of the stem “threaten” in the content.  Furthermore, it is clear from the presence of the Irene story that much (if not all) of it is not even timely.  Is this a “perfect storm” of what happens when failure to understand the nature of search collides with failure to understand the nature of news?