How Not to Use AJAX

Yahoo! Weather used to be my go-to place for weather information. Even though it gets it's data from Weather.com, I like the speed and simplicity over Weather.com's ad filled interface.

Well the tides have turned. Yahoo! decided to implement AJAX on it's search bar for weather. It looks like this:


The whole point of AJAX is that it SAVES you time. But there are two things to notice here. First, you have to type in the city and THEN click "Go" (it doesn't just come up like intellisense). Next, you'll notice that it orders the results by country. So even though more people searching for "Rome" are probably looking for the one in Italy, I get all the Rome's in the USA first (there's like 10) and then the one in Italy, which is provided with a cryptic Italian state and country code. THEN I can click on the one I want and it brings me my weather. In Theory. For some reason though, the AJAX list kept giving me the wrong city. I'd click Buenos Aires, and it brings up San Cristobal. Don't even think about just typing in an area. Unless you have the exact city it doesn't work.

The other annoying thing about Yahoo weather is it doesn't keep the weather search bar at the top...instead it has the news(??) search bar. So even though typically I'd check the weather for where I am, and then where I'm going, I have to use the (gasp) back button to get back to a search.

Ironically, now Weather.com by NOT using AJAX is a dream to use:


You use an old school form to just type in the word Rome...it brings the most likely result up and you click it. Bing bam boom. Takes about a third of the time of the Yahoo AJAX nonsense.

Don't use technology for the sake of technology!