> “We didn’t want to call it a portal, because a portal is a door to somewhere else, and we wanted people to stay there,” says Shannon Brayton, a senior manager in Yahoo’s corporate communications department from 1998 to 2001.
Of course the company that eventually killed them, Google, found its earliest success by explicitly rejecting this ethos. Google was a search engine, they didn't care if it sent you away; they wanted it to send you away, because that meant it was working. It meant you had found what you were looking for. A search engine's entire job is to send you away.
But then came AdWords and the IPO, both of which applied pressure on Google to become something else, something other than a search engine. Something that herded eyeballs together, rather than pushing them out. Something that eventually became what Google ironically is today: a better Yahoo than Yahoo ever was.