Comments on: Boring Headlines or Great Links?

By: Cre8pc on Usability & Holistic SEO It’s Not All About You, Mr. Search Engine »

Sun, 20 Aug 2006 01:34:05 +0000

[...] I enjoy being creative and letting my mind roam around for words it likes, rather than what algorithms like. I like the freedom of knowing I can pick words for my readers without being forced to use up my characters on words intended for robots. Jared Spool wrote a great piece that explores further why print headlines don’t convert well to the web. From Boring Headlines or Great Links? “Like web pages, newspaper pages are often scanned. And like their web counterparts, newspaper headlines are intended to attract the reader’s eyes to a particular story. [...]

By: Scott

Scott — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 17:41:27 +0000

Interestingly, Yahoo and many other sites like espn.com and cbs.sporstline.com now have rollovers that give a brief description of the article. Now you no longer have to click to see if it is of interest. The only problem (at least on my.yahoo.com) is that you don’t know which articles have the rollover and which don’t. Thus, you end up rolling over articles for which there is no description and sitting there waiting for a second. They need a little visual cue or something.

By: Ardith G

Ardith G — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 18:16:24 +0000

Yeah, I switched from reading Yahoo News to reading Google News when Yahoo switched to their headlines-only format. Even with a fast connection having to click to see if an article is of interest to you is a pain.

By: Fred Beecher

Fred Beecher — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 14:37:02 +0000

A co-worker and I frequently express frustration and distress about this very thing in regards to our local paper, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (www.startribune.com). I’ve got an RSS feed set up, and half the time I have no idea what the story is about based on reading the link title. My favorite is “Have you heard?” which turns out to be a “column” full of random news bits.