Yahoo! Seems to Think I Am Very Lonely

Every time I go to Yahoo! to check my e-mail, I get the feeling that I’m being watched. It’s as if a great unseen force has looked into the innermost depths of my personal life and found me deeply lacking.

Yahoo! is of course the second most highly trafficked site on the Internet, second only to the great and mighty Google. I use Yahoo! for e-mail, weather reports, horoscopes, and dozen other features. It’s a useful resource, but it carries one deeply annoying side effect. Every time you visit yahoo.com you have to read the deeply annoying “news” stories on the front page. The headlines are so insipid that they literally cause me physical agony. A few recent ones include:

Watch jump ropers use a human rope

Whiplash the cowboy monkey holds on for dear life

Underwater footage shows dolphins blowing air rings

and

Teach your body to burn fat on its own

Thanks, Yahoo! for those helpful tips!

What’s worse, Yahoo! has a way of seemingly looking into my soul and deciding that I need lots of relationship advice. I get headlines like “See if your girl is cheating on you” or “How to meet women” or “No, seriously, Matt, your social life is sad and pathetic.” Now I know what you’re going to say:

Matt, you’re crazy, everyone gets the same Yahoo! headlines. Sure, there are a relationship-themed news items, but that’s because romance is a top human interest topic.

Whatever. It would be easy for me to shrug off literally thousands of news teasers that seem to judge and accuse. It would be easy to pretend Yahoo! hasn’t hired a giant malevolent robot to spy on me. It would be easy for me to embrace the “sanity” of everyone else. But I don’t wanna!

Here’s my theory. Yahoo! has a simple yet diabolically invasive algorithm designed to gauge how many “sorry you’re a loser” news teasers I get per day. First it counts the number of e-mails I have received from attractive single women in a given day, then it adds one so that the number isn’t zero (it would mess with the math). Then Yahoo! check my internet search history to see how many X-Files episode descriptions I’ve looked at in a given day (usually 3-9). Yahoo! finally divides the first number by the second number and arrives at a decimal number that ranges from 0.01to 0.99. These figures can easily be converted into a percentage of how un-lonely I am. If IO score a0.99, I’m 99 percent not lonely. If I get a 0.01, I’m getting a teaser titled, “How to meet people instead of committing suicide.”

Of course, Yahoo! doesn’t have it all figured out. What if I don’t get e-mails because I talk to the ladies via phone? And what if I check X-Files episode descriptions because I like the X-Files? Huh? What about that? That didn’t occur to you, did it, Mr. Evil Yahoo! Robot? Did it?

That’s what I thought …