This is a sad story of an Internet giant. Started by two guys in a garage it eventually grew to control over 80% of the Internet search market and practically owned the whole Internet.
It was innovative and agile. The stock market loved it - at times the company stock doubled in price within just a month. It was one of the very few surviving companies after the dot-com bubble burst.
The company was adding more and more awesome free services: from newsgroups to image-hosting. It practically reinvented email by launching a great free web-based email app. It introduced a blogging platform and even tried entering the social networking space. It launched a free website-hosting service, introduced its own instant-messenger/voice application, social bookmarking service and many others. It published lots of open-source frameworks, tools and APIs for developers.
The apps it didn't create in-house - it acquired from the competitors, continuing to expand its range of services.
The company acquired several marketing agencies and started offering "paid inclusion" - adding ADs to the search results. Some people even claim that the term "PPC" was invented inside this very company.
But the company kept adding more confusing menus, bells and whistles to its homepage.
The search results were getting more and more cluttered by more and more ADs.
New players came to the field. And many users - first the early adopters then the rest of the crowd - chose the newcomers over the giant.
Eventually, the giant collapsed.
The giant's name was "Yahoo".
"History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme" - Mark Twain.
Once there was a search engine Apr 2, 2012
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12 comments:
Till the end, I was pretty sure you were talking about Google, But as soon as you said "confusing menus, bells and whistles to its homepage" I knew it wasn't Google.
I guess this is what happens when you don't learn from your competitors + mistakes.
@Dhruv Kumar: it's obvious that you love to kiss G's @$$
Although technically, I think Yahoo started out as a online portal rather than a search engine.
When you started out, I was thinking "AltaVista" :-)
@Dhruv Kumar Congratulations for missing the entire point. ;)
Interesting and fun story.
May I translate this post to korean and share it for koreans?
This to me sounds like the direction Google has embarked on...@paulg highlighted the tangent Google has taken, hence his plea for anyone to please take us out of our misery and focus on search that true works a.k.a @blekko :)
Jaeku Park of course, just keep a link to this post:)
Google is not Yahoo!
- Yahoo did not start as a search company. It started as a directory. It didn't get into the search space until the mid-2000s, long after the introduction of many of the products you mentioned.
- Nobody claims Yahoo invented PPC. Yahoo acquired a company that invented it (Overture/Goto.com)
To use your own argument, if Yahoo had stayed the course, they'd be a web directory with CPM ads. In other words, they would have died long ago.
Very interesting blog..
Very interesting...like one other commenter, though I hadn't thought about it, I think Altavista was certainly in a similar category.
In my mind, in the early days, there were two search engines that were useful, depending on the purpose. Yahoo was great because they indexed sites based on categories, a searchable directory. If you were looking for XYZ Corp, Yahoo was the quickest way to get there. For serious and meaty search results, Altavista was the one to go to.
Time passed...Yahoo ceased to be a directory, and as I recall, Altavista started cluttering up, etc...and Google took over. Unfortunately, I'm starting to dislike Google. It hasn't been too bad, but their new penchant for only giving you a few search results, then offering up "alternate search results" (and allowing them to take up half the first page of results) is really getting under my skin. I know what I'm looking for and I searched for what I did for a good reason...and it wasn't to see all the unwanted results that are showing up under the "alternate results"!! Oh well...
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