Yahoo has deteriorated of late

Yahoo has been in the news lately because of the takeover bid from Microsoft. But what I am really concerned about is the fact that Yahoo's services has deteriorated and there has been no attempt to get a lot of the bugs/idiosyncrasies fixed.

I have been using Yahoo email for more than a decade now. Of late, Yahoo has been promoting its "new look" email which emulates an email client program. But all this window dressing doesn't conceal the fact that their basic email feature has a lot of bugs which they haven't bothered to fix in over a year now in spite of repeated requests.

For one, their mail search doesn't work most of the time. At least for me. Even if I type in the name of someone or some subject that occurs in several recent messages in my inbox, the search may return "no matches", or a dozen, or over a hundred depending on its mood. Many times, it would just return an error message saying that there is a problem with accessing my messages, and would ask me to try later.

This has been happening for more than a year now and is really pissing me off. I had complained long ago to Yahoo, and then they did get back to me and said they would fix it which they did. But the problem started again within a month. Subsequent requests to fix it have not elicited any responses. I then wanted to find out if this problem is unique to my account. A friend of mine here in India has also come across the same problem.

Also if I go to their advanced search option and ask to list messages that are older than, even say, 3 months, it would find no matches! This despite the fact that I have messages going all the way back to 2002 in my inbox!

Another thing I find with Yahoo mail is that, I cannot even seem to add the sender's address of many of my incoming emails to my address book! For some weird reason, the link to add the sender's address doesn't appear with some email ids in a random fashion. (And no, this is not because I have already added them.) So many a time, I end up having to manually add the address to the book by cutting and pasting it from the email message.

The above major problems (and several minor ones) are present in their new email interface also. The new email interface lacks the advanced mail search feature which is still there in the classic interface. But this is not a big loss since it doesn't seem to work anyway..

The yahoo email id I use was created when I was in the US, and is still based out of a US server. I have another id which I created as an Indian resident, and the news items which appear on the email home page (now Yahoo India) are outdated by several months.

For example, I see the following entertainment stories displayed on the main email page today (June 28)-
"Witherspoon backs bracelet sales for UN women fund" dated March 5
"Anna Nicole Smith daughter Dannielynn named heir" dated March 5
and a few others, just as old.

I am wondering what the Yahoo India team is doing. Are they even aware of this issue? Are they just plain lazy to get it fixed?

Also Yahoo is famous for making announcements promising that they would offer some new feature in the near future, but would conveniently forget about it. For example, they sent emails some three or four years ago saying they would offer a Yahoo India dating website soon. It never materialized.

Also when they removed the feature to post messages under news items more than a year ago , they had a blurb saying that they would come up with a new messaging board service which would be much better. It's been more than a year now, and one doesn't hear about that anymore. Only God knows whether they have scrapped that plan for good.

These, and a lot of other irritants, have destroyed Yahoo's credibility completely in my view. I plan on switching over to Google (as many have already done). I hope Google's overall level of service is much better. Yahoo's complacence is going to cost it dearly, I'm afraid. Whoever bids for Yahoo is bidding for a rusted and sinking ship.