A few weeks ago I thought of searching for something using Yahoo! So I used the handy-dandy Netscape bookmarks to connect. Yahoo! I did not get. I wound up connected to CDNow.com.
When I downloaded Version something-point-something of Netscape a couple years ago, it came with some preset bookmarks including this one. I have kept the same set of bookmarks built up since then, all through Netscape upgrades, migration to another computer, and reinstallation of Windows. But it has not played this trick until now. What’s up with that, anyway? They couldn’t simply give me a real URL, but had to set me up with something devious?
Netscape had already done something like this before, when most of their preset bookmarks in the “Search” folder took me to not the search engines themselves, but a Netscape search screen. They used this treatment on InfoSeek, ExCite, and a bunch of others. Since I put in AltaVista and HotBot by hand it did not do that to them. I wonder what shenanigans they were up to?
Yahoo pays Netscape for that link in the bar. In return, Yahoo wants to know how many people got there by clicking on the Netscape link (as opposed to typing it in), to see if it was worth the money. One easy way for Netscape to track that data is to send you through a page on their site that redirects you to Yahoo. The number of hits on that page is the number of times people used the link that Yahoo paid for.
Why did it stop working? It looks like someone at Netscape screwed up and made the re-direct for Yahoo go to CDNow instead. Whoops… Might want to complain, if you can find an address to complain too.
That is the main flaw of Netscape. Its bookmark-handling algorithms is not near the quality of IE. There are other programs that do it better than the both of them, such as Compass.