Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers blog

Since we first made changes to the Search experience on Answers in March we have received extensive feedback from the Answers community.  We’re pleased to say we’ve been incorporating this feedback in developing some exciting new changes to how Search works – with some cool new functions to help you get the best out of this feature which we will be unveiling later this week.

However, before you can see the future of Search on Answers, we need to take you back to the past… just for a few days!  For Technical reasons we have to rollback to an older version of the Search page before we can add code to introduce new features – it’s a bit like when the Yamster’s wheel gets stuck.  We have to roll it back a little before it can go forward  again!

As from Monday we’ll be using the old URL structure on Search pages.

Here are the impacts and how you can work around this until we get the new page live:

1)      If you’ve bookmarked your Searches you will get the error page as the URL will no longer be valid.  You don’t need to delete these bookmarks, they will be valid again shortly.  In the interim you will need to go to the Search page and enter your search again.  This will return you the full set of results.

2)      If you currently edit the Search URL to use &orderby=+date (to sort by most recent) and &orderby=-date (to sort by oldest) you will need to use the previous parameters.  These are:

• Instead of &orderby=+date use &s=+date
• Instead of &orderby=-date use &s=-date

We are sorry for the inconvenience this may cause, but we can assure you it will be very temporary and that you will really value the new Search functions we’re launching in a few days!

– Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers Team