#3

(See DDN Fail #1 and #2)

Useless DDN search field:

Useless DDN search results:

Useful Google search results:

(Click any of the above to embiggen.)

My friend John was quoted today in the Dayton Daily News in a piece by Joanne Huist Smith about a planned historical marker for famous lesbian Daytonian Natalie Barney. He told me about the article, and so I went to the DDN website to look for it. Entered “Natalie Barney” in the handy dandy search field at the top of every DDN webpage, clicked on the “SEARCH” button (powered by YAHOO!) and got…   nothing related to Natalie Barney whatsoever.

So I popped over to Google and searched for “site:daytondailynews.com Natalie Barney,” and sure enough, the article for which I was looking was the very first result.

So what does this prove? Well, first, it proves that Google’s better than YAHOO! for searching, which is no big surprise. But it’s yet another illustration of the Cox Ohio media team’s web-ineptness. How difficult could it possibly be for them to come up with a search function in-house that includes the articles published most recently on their own website? Yes, they’re no New York Times (they’re really no New York Times!), but why wouldn’t they want to copy some of the features of nytimes.com?

This illustrates something else as well, namely that Google News, instead of being a threat to newspapers by aggregating their content, is actually an asset to newspapers by making it easier for newspapers’ readers to find the content on newspapers’ websites. Plus it shows that Cox Ohio made a poor bargain when they chose to out-source their search to YAHOO!.

#4

(See DDN Fail #1, #2 and #3)

On today’s DDN homepage is a link to an editorial:

But if you click the link, the page doesn’t exist:

(Click any of the above to embiggen.)

Earlier this month I wrote about an annoying Dayton Daily News fail involving the search function on their site. This morning I found that in addition to it’s sometimes not being possible to use their search to find stories you know exist on their site, it's also impossible to rely on the links the DDN staff themselves put up on their site.

As you can see from the screen shots to the right, one of today’s “Stories you’ll want to read” is an editorial that declares that “Ohio pensions already cost enough.” Well, for once, this was indeed a story I wanted to read (many of the stories they think I’ll want to read, I really have no interest in), so I clicked on the link… and found myself on a helpful page that told me they couldn’t find the page I requested and perhaps the story I wanted was “an older news story” and thus no longer available except in the DDN archives. Brilliant.

Also, don’t try going to the DDN Opinion page, where the top listing under “Local editorials and commentaries” is this same “Ohio pensions already cost enough” article, because the link there also does not work.

And, God forbid, do not try typing “Ohio pensions already cost enough” in the (un)helpful search box at the bottom of their “We can’t find the page you requested” page, because if you do, you’ll be redirected to a page that says “Page Not Found — We’re sorry. The Web address you entered is not a functioning page on our site.” How helpful is it to include a search function on your 404 page when the search function DOES NOT WORK!!

Rule #1 of web development, Cox Ohio Media — whenever you update something on the web, go test it immediately afterwards. No one’s perfect (I don’t even claim to be), and because we all make mistakes, we need to check our work. I’m no newspaper guru, but I understand that in the olden days, this was often done by a proofreader. I do develop websites myself for a living (and yes, sometimes make mistakes), but every single time I create a link, I check it after publishing it to make sure it works, especially if it’s a link I’m highlighting (as in something such as “Stories you’ll want to read”).

The Dayton Daily News, a never-ending source of material for my Web design (bad) tag.