Sucks!

Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels described a Yahoo as, "a race of brutish degraded creatures...having the form and all the vices of man.......vicious coarse persons".

Some of you may have visited and hopefully enjoyed my modest website, where I posted pictures of family & friends, documented vacations, showed family home movies, and taught myself HTML in the process.  Well, it's gone.  Let me tell you a story.

Once there was a company called Geocities, which offered a free home on the Internet to anybody who wanted one.  Hundreds of thousands of neophyte web designers rushed into this new electronic promise-land, and populated their site with a tremendous variety of interesting personal web pages.  Geocities funded all of this by using small, inoffensive banners at the top of each page. You know, the type we're used to seeing on virtually all sites.  Geocities flourished from all the activity, and it was a wonderful example of capitalism at it's best.  There was great rejoicing across the land.  It was a good thing.

One dark day, Geocities was acquired by Yahoo.  Suddenly we had horrible little ads popping up in our cherished sites. The ad scheme constantly changed too, as Yahoo invented new ways to make the ads as intrusive and disruptive as possible.  First it was popup browser windows.  Then it was a dreadful automatic salesbot that actually inserted free-floating ads into our HTML code, which randomly moved about the page with each access, obscuring and disfiguring the aesthetics of the sites we'd worked so hard to build.  

Then the useful services were gradually plucked away, like petals from a rose, eventually leaving only the thorny stem.  First to go was SMTP mail service.  "Use your own goddamn mail servers, you buncha freeloaders!" Yahoo said.  "Hey, we're gonna change the guestbook code too, thereby deleting all of the notes visitors have left you over the years.  Now bugger off, so we can count the profits we've made selling worthless stock to naive investors."  

Next some folks found their sites were, well.... GONE!!  Yes, it seemed Yahoo was removing any content they felt was the slightest bit offensive, and evidently their editorial team was made up of the vilest sort of prude, puritanical, ignorant troglodytes.  The kind of "people" who might outlaw dancing in a small town, or put someone on trial for teaching evolution.  

A few weeks back, I received notice from the Yahoo Fun Patrol that FTP access to websites would no longer be free.  "Wow," I said "I've built a rather complex site, and now I have to use your childishly simplistic web-based tools to painstakingly upload files one at a time, just so I can update it?"  "Yes, that's exactly right," said the Yahoo kitten kickers.  "By limiting you to crude tools, we can force everybody to conform to our own narrow vision of how the web should look.   Now excuse us, we've got a lot of copies of Tom Sawyer to burn."

Today I got another delightful email from the trouser pilots at Yahoo.  (I don't know what a "trouser pilot" is, but it sure sounds offensive to me, hence it's use here.)  "Guess what?" said the Yahoo mail-goon, no doubt typing with one hand while scratching with the other.  "We're taking away incoming POP mail access too.  Whataya think of that, you little sinner? If you still want to read your mail you'll have to use our webmail page, so we can clutter your hard drive with cookies that violate your privacy and track your every move on the Internet. You see, we need this marketing information so we can come up with more intrusive ads to plaster all over your websites. It's all part of the master plan, and we suggest you don't resist."

I'm officially abandoning my Geocities/Yahoo website as of today, and have uploaded this page in it's place.  If I stick around much longer, I fear Yahoo will eventually get around to tattooing a serial number and/or banner ad on my arm, so I'm getting out now.  I've asked them to remove all trace of my account, but since that would actually be demonstrating RESPONSIVENESS to a user's request, they probably won't.  I suspect though, that once their content bots come across this site, it will be wiped clean and pure so Yahoo can once again be safe for god-fearing prudes and nazis.  Which is fine with me.  Just to be sure, I have hidden a number of profanities in my code, which are bound to  be caught in their electronic dragnet.

In conclusion, I must say....

Anyone that restricts freedom of speech is a Yahoo!

Anyone that doesn't value their user base is a Yahoo!

Anyone that can not cope with rapid growth is a Yahoo!

Anyone that sells or buys over-valued stock (like Yahoo's) is a Yahoo!

Anyone that uses Yahoo is a Yahoo!

Here are some search engines that are 100 times better than Yahoo! Use these engines and boycott Yahoo!

Google is the bomb, absolutely the most comprehensive search engine out there.  They also keep cached copies of pages that no longer exist, thereby preserving a tremendous amount of information that otherwise would be lost.  Their Groups search (formerly "DejaNews") is also brilliant, allowing you to search ALL THE USENET POSTS EVER MADE, thereby making the combined knowledge and experience of millions available to us all.

Cyber 411 Searchs Altavista, DejaNews, Excite, Galaxy, Goto, HotBot, LookSmart, Lycos, Magellan, PlanetSearch, Search.Com, Snap, Thunderstone, WebCrawler, What U Seek and Yahoo (which sucks).

Savvy Search Searches Altavista, Infoseek, Excite, Webcrawler, Thunderstone.