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The Glory That Was Yahoo

fastcompany.com

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Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#91

Post by darrenf »

stevenwoo wrote: post #35
netc wrote: post #31

Once I went to Stanford to attend Donald Knuth's Annual Christmas Lecture. During the talk he wanted to show some search query on google. What he did next was interesting. He typed yahoo.com in a browser's address bar and then searched for google on yahoo's search to reach to google!!

That had to have been a joke - that's a common old person meme in IT.

Definitely not a joke. Well, perhaps that specific instance is, but at Yahoo! many of the most common search terms were domains; one argument had internally for not putting cursor focus in the search bar was precisely because people just used it as if it were the address bar, and the appetite to support that use case was low. (Source: ex-Yahoo! staff, albeit not in search and with a fallible memory).

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#92

Post by tabtab »

Great quote from Paul Graham on Yahoo's demise: Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That's why people proposing to destroy it [replacing it with "suit" culture] use phrases like "adult supervision." That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#93

Post by henrikschroder »

BlueAThrow wrote: post #55
saralily wrote: post #2

What glory? All these points were acquisitions. Everything this article celebrates were destroyed by Yahoo. The only thing they ever did well was build a portal.

I worked for AOL, who Verizon recently merged with Yahoo . It was inevitable they destroyed the startups . Yahoo processes made us look lean in comparison, and we were another old web 1.0 company . The first thing they make you do is port to their tech stack and so much time is spent on that process and approvals from central teams that it's a wonder anything gets done . They've got their own package manager, own int…

> but they're mid-2000s tech in quality .

This was the most disappointing part of being acquired. It was quite a wake-up call to realize that the culture inside Yahoo actually believed that their tech stack was good and competitive and that they were as innovative as Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon.

Nope. Yahoo obviously had a bunch of really clever people working there up until the year 2000, and they had to build a lot of things that didn't exist back then, because they were the first internet behemoth. But then all of those really clever people quit, and the company was left trying to steward the existing systems, while not having enough brainpower to create successor systems. So they were stuck, and a myopic "we're hot shit!" culture developed.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world went on, and "Yahoo scale" just aren't very impressive numbers anymore, and their 2000's tech stacks are just horribly overly complex solutions.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#94

Post by darrenf »

I think my biggest takeaway from this article is how few names I recognise in it, apart from all the CEOs, despite working for Yahoo! from 1999 to 2011. Mind you, in Europe I rarely felt particularly connected to what was going in in Sunnyvale. Still proud to have worked on the official FIFA world cup website, among other things.

The Google misstep (as it was considered by many) hurt for a while. The high traffic mailing list for unmoderated developer chat eventually begat a "what would Google do?" offshoot because Gmail this, search that, page rank the other were dominating too many threads.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#96

Post by question_that »

stevenwoo wrote: post #34
paulryanrogers wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google seems to be falling into a similar pattern with it's many different attempts at chat apps

Google's income stream from advertising is not as vulnerable as Yahoo's home page for the internet model as far as I know.

Google is in the process of repulsing half the country with illegal hiring practices and arbitrary censorship, I wouldn't bank on ineffective ads keeping the company afloat for another decade.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#97

Post by danaliv »

dpark wrote: post #73
onli wrote: post #20

The Google search comparisons in the article are strange. Google did not win the search engine war because it had integrated ads, I think it won because the search results were so much better. There might be some indirect connection - less revenue because of a different advertising model, leading to less investment - but I rather think this was just about the technology not being there. Which is maybe not that surpri…

> The Google search comparisons in the article are strange. Google did not win the search engine war because it had integrated ads Extremely strange. Google won because search was better. Users flocked there because it actually worked . The fact that it had integrated ads was incidental. Integrated ads helped with funding obviously, but users don't care about that. (To the extent that they do, they actively don't wan…

This is my recollection as well. Google was amazing because the results were so astonishingly better than anything else before it.

As for ads, I don't recall Google even having ads at all to begin with. And when they did start including advertising, everyone was already getting annoyed with web ads, and Google had somehow found a way to do ads "right."

(Unrelated: I would just like to say that the subheading "Portal Combat" is worth the salary of whoever wrote it.)

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#98

Post by kyrra »

maxxxxx wrote: post #89
stevenwoo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's income stream from advertising is not as vulnerable as Yahoo's home page for the internet model as far as I know.

They still haven't demonstrated that they can make significant money on anything other than advertising. They do a lot of stuff but nothing really turns into a profitable business. Compare that to Microsoft who have shown over decades many times an ability to get into new lines of business profitably.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204418...

Take a look at Google's earnings. in 2017 Google made $95 billion from ads, and $14.2 billion from "other revenue". Which is classified as:

Other Revenue: Apps, in-app purchases, and digital content in the Google Play store; Google Cloud offerings; and Hardware.

So Google is making money from other places, just not near as much as Ads yet.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#99

Post by FussyZeus »

russellbeattie wrote: post #9

IT's amazing that something so simple as a not having a clear vision/mission could take down a successful company but that's the essentially what happened at Yahoo! When I worked there in 2004 it was just confused, chasing competitors and ideas, never deciding on what it wanted to be when it grew up. I left a year or so later and from what I saw it never figured itself out. I always wanted the company to focus on a m…

> ...but Yahoo! was never content with that. They wanted to be eBay, or Google, or Facebook, or YouTube or whoever else was a big player at the time, instead of focusing on the customer loyalty they had already generated.

This is far from unique about Yahoo! too. So many services I loved using have gone under because they were VC funded and, though successful, useful, etc., weren't able to "eat the world" and so were shuttered.

I keep waiting for Twitter to go under that way. I think the Trump White House may have bought them some time, but they're just too damn top heavy to stay afloat.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#100

Post by ksangeelee »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #81
ksangeelee wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I first saw Google I'd been using AltaVista almost exclusively because it allowed phrase searching and keyword exclusion. Google seemed primitive by comparison. However, it was light and fast at a time when most of my access was via 64k lines or dial-up. AltaVista had become increasingly cluttered with GIF advertising and 'portal' nonsense. AltaVista became slow and cumbersome, while Google was fast and clean. F…

Yes, this. While I appreciated Google's relevancy for search it didn't blow me away that much -- the real special sauce that early-Google had was the extremely lightweight search page. At a time when Altavista, lycos, Yahoo, etc. were just piling on goop after goop onto their landing pages, Google did a really smart thing and disrupted the whole space with its very minimal style. Not even sure how deliberate that was…

I think it was deliberate, because when they did include advertising in search results, they innovated with text-only ads (and on an unobtrusive part of the page).

I recall that I grew to appreciate these ads - they were often relevant to what I was doing at that point in time. Much more civilised than the garish GIFs that were the norm at that time.

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