A Vacation From Search? Hardly!
Last Monday I was just back from a long-delayed one-week vacation in Mexico, and got two emails from two VPs at Yahoo! about some posts on a search forum. A thread complained about quality/relevance of Yahoo! Search results for certain queries, and another was on error 999 that a few users encountered while using Yahoo! Search.
Man, talk about back to reality: from basking in the sunshine on the sandy beaches of Cancun, to having to dig through all the software changes and log entries to investigate these two seemingly random posts. Hmmm…Now I know why search developers have no social life: having to do no evils at the cost of no vacations (or vacations immediately purged from one’s short/long-term memory). But I digress. The investigation actually turned out to be fruitful: one inadvertent bug (is there any other kind of bug?) and one intended behavior (error 999 would be served to machines sending “excessive, anomalous, or abusive traffic” – and on the heel of myDoom, a few users might get this, not knowing that their machines might be infected with myDoom. This should be a topic of another blog post.)
But I digress again. The point here is that we get feedback in nearly real-time now. Blogs, forums, message boards, you name it. I am impressed that Yahoo! Search really cares about its product quality to monitor the posts from its users, especially when the monitoring was actually done by the “higher ups” (hey, we have QA and surfers here at Yahoo! Search too you know). Before having a search engine of our own, we relied on others and had to wait for escalation, feedback, service level agreements, etc … before an issue was resolved. Now it seems like everyone here helps keep an eye on things. For that, I am thrilled.
Whether that thrill qualifies to erase my annual vacation so fast from my memory, the jury is still out.
Nam Nguyen
Technical Yahoo!
Okay, what’s up with the change from “feedbacks” to “feedback” in the second-to-last paragraph? Did some marketing guy read over the post and correct your spelling?
–Quentin
hi.i dont know im a new commer.
Hi,
I have only 1 suggestion…bot/crawler should crawl the sites more frequently because i have seen in many cases…many many old search results are being showed up.. i.e. cached pages are very old..
when i had changed my site i.e. 4-5 months back..yahoo was showing my old pages for almost 2-3 months
Regards
Deep
I read that comment on a forum as well and wondered if people at the engines read that as well. Glad to know that yahoo does. And that you responded as well.
I gotta agree with Deep (And I thought I had a good name), Some of the results that come up are outdated. I find it strange that some of the rss feed results, which are new to yahoo, are outdated as well….
BTW: Stop daydreaming about that vacation and get back to work – lol
“Because There’s a Bastard In All of Us”
The Mad Dater – A Dating Blog
http://themaddater.blogspot.com
Hi Quentin,
Are you kidding me? this is an official public outlet so of course my post was reviewed before being posted. Without those reviews, my original post would look as if it was written by someone just introduced to English as a Second Language! Oops, I did learn English as a Third Language :-). But all kidding aside, thank god they corrected my misspelling mistakes.
Nam
Nah, I’m not kidding. I had expected as much. It’s no big deal. I guess I had just hoped that a company would finally let us see into their inner workings, without any sanitizing by upper management/marketing. No one’s gonna mind some spelling mistakes, but it’ll be more interesting when paragraphs start disappearing after some marketing guy thinks the information shouldn’t be released.
Don’t mind me, I’m only a cynical guy who thinks that a public company can never really care about its customers. It’s nothing personal :P
–Quentin
Oh. Well. If your VPs actually sent you folks all the legitimate problems with Yahoo that are posted on various forums, your entry here would be “wow, I got back from vacation and only had 2 problems to research rather than the thousand or so I usually get in a week! Now that’s a vacation!”
This is very nice that you worked on these issues and that your VPs noticed them somewhere, and all that, but what about the bigger issues, please. What about the fact that webmasters in these forums complain more about Yahoo than all the other SEs put together? And that their experience is that the Yahoo company either does not respond to issues or, worse, displays an ugly attitude when it does?
Don’t believe me? Please. Check it out for yourselves. Do it seriously, and not as dilettante VPs apparently do. Then use this blog to be real.
Hey Marcus,
Any chance you can point us at specific complaints? Surely not all of the thousands, but it’d be nice to know what they are. Especially since they’re bigger issues.
(Though users being denied access is a pretty big problem in my mind.)
As it is, you’re asking us to do something in a less than helpful way.
Marcus,
As Jeremy mentioned, I would love to hear more about the specific complaints. We have different groups taking care of different issues, so neither I nor Jeremy could address all the “displays of ugly attitude” that you mentioned, if they were indeed true. But your helping to point out what they were would be a proper first step in the right direction.
Just speaking for me here, but after having just enough time fixing two problems a week (not a thousand :-)), I have intermittently visited a few Search Forums to check out things. But sometime it is so difficult a) to see if this is a user’s issue or a webmaster’s issue (sometime they are different), b) to identify a real issue (in my world, software bugs) from a non-issue and c) to comment on things there (I haven’t seen any guideline on such practice, to be honest.)
We just launched our own technology on search.yahoo.com in less than a year, so I am sure we have rooms to improve.
Thanks,
Nam
I’m getting Yahoo! error 999 frequently when I am trying to access my various Yahoo groups not when I’m conducting Yahoo!Search. This just started happening the past couple of weeks. Can anyone tell me what to do?
Hi all,
Does anyone know what it means when doing a search for yahoo and your get this page:
Title: “yahoo! – 999 This page is currently unavailable”
Copy: “This page is currently unavailable.
Unfortunately, we are unable to process your request at this time. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please try again later.
Return to yahoo! ”
This message is showing up on all of the computers in our network. Any ideas?
Thanks,
Morteza mohaghegh
Hi to all,
YES, I’ve been getting this exact message lately when trying to access my yahoo account, it’s getting to be rediculous! I’ve not been able to check my email for over 3 days now.
Mahsa
Folks, that is unbelievable… 5 days without reading my emails caused by “error 999″.
Some say to try the “secure” mode to log in… It didn’t work for me. Other say to change the proxy… Again, the problem persists.
Any idea, friends? I have important stuff to read sended by relatives abroad…
Tks
Error 999, try checking what kind of Filter you have going or what kind of “Web Accelorator” you have running…try disabling them, refresh the page and try again.
That is all.. :)
Our whole LAN users getting the following message while trying to yahoo mail for long time.
“Unfortunately, we are unable to process your request at this time. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please try again later.
Return to yahoo! ”
please help to over come this problem. I specially reaquest Nam for tips.
salahuddin
I can no longer play Yahoo games because Error 999 won’t let me log in. Help!
I have numerous free AND paid accounts. Haven’t been able to access any of them for days because of your useless “Error 999″ login failure pages. I use a proxy (anonymizer) for good reason, and I have no slightest intention of rearranging my life because you can’t sort out how to deal with net problems. Just in case you haven’t pulled your head out far enough to do a subject search on your own system, “error 999″ is becoming a MAJOR issue. As for me, it will take a few weeks to get everything transferred somewhere else and let everyone know that I’ve given the big swirly to Yahoo, Geocities, and Small Business hosting, but you can rest assured we aren’t done yet…I’ll badmouth you everywhere I can find a forum to do it. Thanks a pantload, Yahoo.
error 999 traumas im no exppert can someone out there help me access my email account please explain in simple lanuage as i dont know what a web accelerator or filter is .
thanks
Christina
my yahoo geocities site has been down 4 days its been off line due to this problem 999 error
I contacted Yahoo! geocities Pagebuilder.
this is all I keep getting???
I understand that you are reporting that your site is not available on
the web.
We believe that the problem you are experiencing is a transient one that
shouldn’t persist. The problem may have been caused by our system, by
your web browser, or a problem on the Internet between your ISP and us.
Whatever the case, we apologize for any inconvenience that it caused.
If you continue to experience the problem, please reply to this message
describing it in as much detail as possible, including the steps you
take leading up to it, how often it occurs, and the exact text of any
error messages that you receive. This information will help us to
provide a solution more quickly.
Please do not hesitate to reply if you need further assistance
Unfortunately, we are unable to process your request at this time. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please try again later.
Return to Yahoo!
wirrrrrrrrr
Please help me with opening my yahoo mail box.It is really necessary for me.I am far away from my country and I need to check my e-mails for my job,studies etc.
Error 999 is making me crazy.
I have been facing this error most of the time scince a few days ago.
Thanks for your kind attention.
for anyone experiancing problems with yahoo mail because of error 99 the only suggestion is try incredimail and use your yahoo sign in etc and all your mail will be transferred by a pop mail account its really easy to set up ,even for a novice like me …youll get all your yahoo mail transferred to this account and when yahoo get there asses in gear you can shut that account down and reuse yawn woops sorry yahho again .ps incredimail is free
try the Firefox
I believe the Yahoo Error 999 is caused by Yahoo doing traffic monitoring. It seems they only allow a certain amount of traffic per time period per IP address.
See http://pgoffline.com/forum/index.php?board=5;action=display;threadid=17;start=0 for a lot of info on this issue.
Seems the “999 error” has been going on for several days here in “the OC” public library system. Don’t know why Yahoo wouldn’t be able to recognize the IP for a public library system, but it’s more than a little frustrating for such a giant as Yahoo to block out so many people whose only access to their email is through a public county library system. What help can you provide if any?
I’ve been facing the “999 Unable to process request” for almost a fortnight now. I found out that Yahoo blocks IPs to control traffic but it is so annoying! Apparently normal human usage of the y! services shouldn’t have caused this, but because I recieve a lot of e-mail I had to log on twice daily to keep up. That hardly sounds ‘abnormal’ though.
The block is from anywhere between 2 – 24 hours, and the block also keeps renewing itself daily.
My solution was to just switch to another mail provider.
I have several Yahoo photo albums and have recently (2 weeks ago and again yesterday) started receiving the following message when attempting to add photos or do any type of editing or downloading to albums under any of my screen names.
“This page is currently unavailable…. Unfortunately, we are unable to process your request at this time. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please try again later. …. Return to Yahoo!” “error #999″
This occurred while I was downloading several photos to an album which was not completed. Yahoo tech support was unable to help. I ran all protection programs and nothing was detected. I also tried shutting down firewalls, virus protection, anti-spy and adware and cleared files, cookies, and history without success. Using other browsers was also unsuccessful. I believe the problem was “fixed” 2 weeks ago due to time… how sneaky of Yahoo. It does appear Yahoo is monitoring and limiting usage although I still have access to other services (email) they will not allow me to upload more photos until the time limit??? is up. One tech told me there was a “limited amount of space available per screen name” which is not the case but the “quantity” of usage over a period of time seems to be the answer. This link may be more helpful: http://www.murraymoffatt.com/software-problem-0011.html