Yahoo! Site Explorer: A Step Backwards
Posted on October 07, 2008 by Brian Tajuddin
I have been using Yahoo! Site Explorer for some time to track my site's status on the Yahoo! search engine. I have to say that I'm somewhat partial to Yahoo! for a couple reasons.
First, they index a lot more of my pages. They currently have almost 200k pages indexed on my site. Second, they provide more information about how they view your site in a real-time manner. Sure, it's not completely real time, but you can actually see changes occurring.
For the record, I also use the webmaster tools for Google and Microsoft Live. Both of them suck pretty bad.
Recently, I noticed that Yahoo! had a link to the "new" Site Explorer. I took a look and was pretty annoyed by what I saw. I guess I was alone because they've launched it. It is a step backward in useful design. The functionality is almost exactly the same as the previous version. They've spruced up the buttons a bit and added a little more color. Otherwise, they moved some navigational items from the top to the left and made the useful area of the screen 10% smaller. That's not enough, though. They decided that all this variable width stuff is useless. The information column is now 772 pixels wide. Sure, it fits perfectly on a 1024x768 screen. It's tiny on my 1280x1024 screen.
I cannot fathom what would make them do this. In the world where larger screens are more common, why would you tailor a site to the screen size people were using 5 years ago. I haven't seen an LCD monitor with a 1024x768 native resolution in years.
My advice to anyone out there is to fire any web designer who will not make their design adjust to the width of the user's browser window.