While I have my complaints about Google Webmaster Tools, I’m starting to the appreciate its beauty now that I’m face-to-face with its competitors.
I just got around to submitting the sitemap for my last project, the new Mercatus Center website, to Bing and Yahoo! Bing’s user interface leaves a lot to be desired, but thanks Yahoo!’s website ownership verification system, I have yet to even see what their UI even looks like. That’s right, after I downloaded their xml verification file, I was met with this:
If you have uploaded the verification file, please keep the file y_key_********.html on your site root http://mercatus.org and do not change the content (********).We will authenticate your site ownership by checking this file within 24 hours.
Because of this, the task of submitting my sitemap now takes two days instead of two minutes. I need to remember to visit this page again, then submit the sitemap, and then visit the page again later to see if Yahoo! has any problems with any of the site’s URLs. Why can’t Yahoo! just navigate to the address of the file, verify that it’s there, and then give me permission to submit a sitemap for the site?
I don’t claim to know much about the complexities of corporate management or what fostering a good “corporate culture” even means, but clearly Yahoo! has tremendous quality control issues. Its products aren’t even in the same league as its competitors because of the failure of engineers to simply do their jobs.
It’s a little thing, but it’s all the little things working right that’s made Google what it is today and those same things not working that’s made Yahoo! into the butt of jokes—and not just any jokes. They’re the butt of nerd jokes.
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