Weekend Search Changes

This past weekend, I've been giving several workshops in Monterey at the Internet Librarian conference. It is always fun to give a workshop on Web searching on the weekend when the search engines tend to roll out new features or give otherwise unusual results. I had two such situations this weekend, both of which are back to normal today. First, I tried to demonstrate searching the Yahoo! directory from the main Yahoo! page by just clicking on the "Directory" tab above the search box. On both Saturday and Sunday, when searching "monterey" that way, Yahoo! said there were zero directory results, even though if I went straight to dir.yahoo.com and search "monterey," I got plenty of results. Meanwhile, over at Google, I was demonstrating what happens when you click on the "more >>" link which used to bring up links to "Books," "Froogle," "Groups," and "even more," but no link to Google Scholar. On Sunday, "Scholar" had been added to that last of four. I was hoping that the Scholar addition would be permanent and that Yahoo! would fix the directory search. As of today when I tested both situations, the Yahoo! directory searching is fixed, but Scholar no longer appears under "more >>." Oh well.