Worker Bees Blog

I've pretty much had it trying to effectively use Yahoo Search Marketing

First, most search engine marketers know that Yahoo did a system upgrade that resulted in major and long-lasting outages and problems over the last two weeks.

Got a long email from Yahoo the other day about the problems they've been having with their paid search system. Nice email. Blah blah "we're growing". Blah blah "we're sorry." Blah blah "making improvements." It took 'em a bit long for my taste to reach out and get personal with their thousands of disgruntled customers, but the email was moderately explanatory and acceptably apologetic. But here's my suggestion. Yahoo included this as their penultimate paragraph:

"We absolutely understand that any system downtime creates difficulties for you and we would like to hear from you. If you have any feedback or comments, please send us an email at comments-ysm@cc.yahoo-inc.com." The solicitation of feedback seems like they're following some textbook recommendation that you have to be open to feedback, but really, what can
customers, like me, say, except, "that sucked" and "get it right the next time." And I think they already know that!

Well, a week of being unable to edit listings probably cost me more than time and "difficulty", it probably cost me money. How about a credit? Shall I email them and ask for that and see what kind of response I get?

But today is the capper. Not only are they apparently incapable of executing a system upgrade without major long-lasting problems , but their normal workings aren't exactly easy and reliable. See, they did another set of system "refinements" yesterday. Here's the message they posted:

"In order to continue to make refinements to our systems that will address performance and availability, we will require a five-hour maintenance period, during which time you will not be able to access your account. The maintenance will begin Tuesday at 10:00 p.m. and is scheduled to last through Wednesday at 3:00 a.m. Pacific Time. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."

As you might imagine the system is completely unusable today. I'm trying to set up a new ad campaign, and am now officially giving up after having them lose data, having pages load incorrectly and then being able to get them to reload properly. If I see one more "ServletException" message I'm going to scream.

That's not even to mention the error message I get after a supposedly successful log-in every single day:
"ServletException in:/acctSummary.do] javax.servlet.jsp.JspException: An error occurred while evaluating custom action attribute "test" with value "${! Account.clientOnOffEnabled}": An error occurred while getting property "clientOnOffEnabled" from an instance of class com.overture.dtc.databeans.Account (java.lang.NullPointerException"

I have to click away from the summary page and then back to get the page to load properly, and this was before the system "upgrades."

I'd almost like to think it's just me and some dork-move of mine, because I hate to think that a major company like Yahoo can have such a poor product and keep it alive. (Heh, I guess I should think of Microsoft and keep my big mouth shut?)

So tell me, is it just me? Seriously.

// posted by ElisaC @ 4:35 PM