The history of Yahoo is really a very condensed version of the "7 steps of business" isn't it? For you youngsters who don't remember why Yahoo used to be awesome, I'll go through my memories of Yahoo below. A small team have an idea and start to screw around with it. In the early 90's finding stuff on "the InterNet" was a pain in the ass. AltaVista existed, Gopher was still kicking around, but they were not evolving fast enough. The idea has merit, starts to build and every penny needs to be watched like a hawk, the idea becomes a business. Yahoo was everyone in my circle's home page by the end of 1995. No Adblock, no noscript, so we saw every fucking ad. getting an ad on the front page of yahoo cost insane amounts of money, but made you a household name. The other amazing thing about the early Yahoo is that most if not all the first results of a search were put there manually. Looking for 15th century French literature in Yahoo guaranteed you a good source of material. Yahoo exploded. everyone I knew used Yahoo from about 96-99. Even my parents. This is the time that yahoo was trying to be the front page of the internet, the portal to compete with AOL. By 2000 Yahoo was everywhere, but the search was falling behind as the web exploded at the start of the dotbomb. Yahoo was still my home page, and I used it for mail, but I used a list of favorites that helped me find new stuff online. Friends told me about this new search called "google" or something and that it used code and software to index the entire internet rather than people. We stared using the new search engine right at the dotcom bubble burst and the 9/11 attacks happened. Yahoo was useless on 9/11 by the way, I got most of my info that day directly from the BBC's web services. Google and the automating of search indexes ate Yahoo's revenue stream; they could not keep up. If you hated AOL's and MSN's home page, Yahoo's was worse. It was too busy, finding new stuff was awefull and I started going there less and less. Gmail in 2004(?) killed the last need I had for Yahoo as a company. And now, here we are watching Yahoo prepare to sell off its core Internet business. From boom to irrelevancy in roughly 20 years. There is a moral to this story... If you rest on your ass and think that just because you are the biggest kid on the block people will use you? You are doomed. Ask Sears, Montgomery Wards, Barnes and Nobles, Borders, Tower Records, Myspace, etc. how that worked out for them. Segmenting the core search into its own unit is probably the best thing that Google is doing now. All the other stuff was a distraction from the core business of selling ads on the internet, and why I think Google is going to be around for a while.
In 1993 I started running a web site at NASA. The site I had up was just a test of this new "World Wide Web" thing, and I was researching how it could be used within NASA. But I had been running BBSes and participating in Usenet forums and The Well for many years, so I was super engaged with all the other sites and users I could find out there. And no doubt having the name "NASA" attached to my page drove a lot of traffic to my pages and especially my Links page. So anyway, I was contacted at some point by someone at Yahoo (I'd like to think it was Jerry Yang, but ... shit ... that was over 20 years ago!) who asked to see my log files, because I was getting traffic from all over the world. Their traffic was very limited at the time, and they were trying to make sure their tools worked with all the different ways web traffic was represented from around the world. So I sent them the files. Never heard back from them. I post this here to Hubski since I will not be having children, and therefore cannot bore my grandchildren with my stories of the the internet in the olden days. Some Mountebank is welcome to scoop this up and start using it as their own, with their own children. You're welcome.
Realistically speaking, Yahoo was a gatekeeper between content and audience... same as every advertising agency, broadcaster, studio, record label or radio station everywhere. They were the first ones to attempt to brute-force an index by exploring the web by hand, back when two college kids could reasonably do that. This allowed them to get to the mountain first, but it didn't keep them on top. I've always been lukewarm towards Yahoo because they never indexed the shit I cared about - for my searches, they were thoroughly useless. It was either altavista.digital.com or, far more likely, go2net.metacrawler.com - metacrawler being the first brute-force "let's see what a half-dozen search engines tell you and then we'll weight it" approach to search engine mechanization. This allowed you to see that Yahoo sucked, Ask Jeeves was comically bad and then, for two brief months, holy shit this Google thing was effective. Then Google blocked go2net but it didn't matter because there was no point in using any other search engine. Go2net went from $130 a share to delisted in the space of six months. That was Yahoo: a hand-crafted index of plain vanilla search results, by people who could use the Internet, for people who couldn't. Really, it's a testament to their vitality that they're still around, considering they became irrelevant not long after people got sick of hearing "You've got mail!"
Yahoo wasn't bad for the case of "I know this thing exists, and that's about all I know about it. I want to fix that.", like a lot of people use wikipedia for now. You wouldn't get deep into anything off the beaten path, but you could usually learn enough to go digging.
It wasn't that they used a spider to index the Web that was advantageous to google, lots of search engines were doing that. It was that they weren't just doing conventional text search to return results, so they wouldn't fall for the spider traps that filled every other search engine's results for every query with porn. Yahoo avoided that problem too, but in a ridiculously labor intensive way. And I agree with pg on this one, what killed them wasn't their technical faults, it was that they were a tech company run by marketing people.
Spider traps! Oh, god the terrors that brings back to the memory buckets. 100% agree here.It was that they weren't just doing conventional text search to return results, so they wouldn't fall for the spider traps that filled every other search engine's results for every query with porn.
And I agree with pg on this one, what killed them wasn't their technical faults, it was that they were a tech company run by marketing people.