Dot Tactics

So I often use a search engine to quickly look up a website rather than typing in the location. No problem, right? Well I recently took Yahoo up on their default search challenge and started using them in my FireFox search box. Funny thing is, when I did a quick search for Adsense a few days ago and clicked on the first natural result the page didn't come up.

I thought it odd at the time but over the past few days I've tried a few more times and I can't get Yahoo to redirect to Google's Adsense page. I've asked other people on other networks and they have the same problem. I've also found the same is true for Adwords searches. The problem only appears to impact Yahoo's redirection link as Google's servers are very clearly up .

What is going on? I tried a few other searches such as Maps and Talk and haven't had any problems. I also noticed that on the Adsense search Yahoo is showing a shortcut to their new Publisher Network product. Could it be that someone at Yahoo decided they don't want to provide free traffic to Google's competing advertising services and so they broke the redirection system? The end result is it makes it look like Google's servers are down.

Incidentally Google's Yahoo Search Marketing Ads on both of the searches do work when clicked. I'm sure Google is paying a pretty penny to get the top billing for those terms.