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The Glory That Was Yahoo

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Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#101

Post by ahtu123 »

deckard1 wrote: post #58
irrational wrote: post #36

I remember back in 1995 getting on Yahoo one day and going through every single category and clicking every website link in the entire directory (I was in college and bored). I like to tell my kids that at one point it was possible to visit every singe website on the WWW ;-)

There was a brief period of time where visiting a link felt like a new adventure. We take the simplicity of a "link" for granted today, probably because most links are just clickbait now. Eventually links turned into time-consuming traps of "under construction" animations and icons and popup advertising hell. But even then, the Internet truly felt like the wild west.

I miss the diversity in web design back in the day. From blinking, colorful and seizure-inducing to very dark pages with little torch gifs. Weirdly enough every website now looks the same (ok maybe we have 3 archetypes of web design) even though the number of sites has grown exponentially for decades.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#102

Post by ahtu123 »

whoisjuan wrote: post #17

Wow. I didn't know about Yahoo! Music. That was definitely a service ahead of its time. I can see why it failed in the early 2000s (less trust in internet transactions, slower bandwidth) but it's basically the same service that Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, etc, offer nowadays.

Early 2000's was the heyday of illegal music services though. Audiogalaxy being the best but things like Napster and Limewire and emule were just too tempting for any legal alternative to swoop in yet.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#103

Post by eli »

dpark wrote: post #71
cpeterso wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, Google was one of the first search engines to AND your search terms by default, returning relevant pages from long tail sites. Other search engines at the time would OR your search terms, returning irrelevant pages from popular sites. I think this simple difference in defaults had almost as big an impact as Google's PageRank/BackRub algorithm.

Every search engine of Yahoo's era supported ANDing terms. It didn't help. The result you wanted was still swimming beneath 7 pages of trash. Commonly it wasn't even in the results because the AND was too restrictive. Backrub is what made Google so much better. Google also really focused on search and made numerous improvements, but the linchpin was backrub.

It was also ludicrously fast at returning results compared to everyone else at the time. I was shocked at the time that a dynamically generated page could return so quickly.

I still to this day miss Altavista's advanced operators though

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#104

Post by cambalache »

kyrra wrote: post #98
maxxxxx wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Around 13% of total revenue then, growing year on year, that's nice. I would like to know what percentage of net profit is contributed by that fraction.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#105

Post by mgkimsal »

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.

it's a meme but i've also seen it happen.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#106

Post by bdcravens »

bluGill wrote: post #33
code_duck wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even back in the day, I preferred Altavista. I have never perceived yahoo or any of their products as good, or used any regularly, other than a few that were acquired like Flickr.

yahoo was before Altavista. When they started a table of contents of the web it was great - back when the web was small enough that you could make a table of contents (at the time gopher was bigger than the web and growing faster, and gopher was mostly accessed via the table of contents). When Altavista came yahoo's index was better because instead of having to figure out the right search terms you could navigate a l…

> yahoo was before Altavista

You're talking about a very small window there, even if you focus on more than launch date. I remember Yahoo being the go to around 1995, and Altavista being the source for power results starting around 1997-99 or so. That's an iPhone 6s to iPhone 8 window of time.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#107

Post by scarface74 »

kyrra wrote: post #98
maxxxxx wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's revenue not profit.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#108

Post by scarface74 »

stevenwoo wrote: post #74
joering2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not AS vulnerable but in the near future when you search thru voice commands and hear results back, all those google ads that your eyes scan can be thrown out of window. Here is relevant read: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/27/alphabet-investors-voice-sea...

Interesting. To Google's credit, they jumped on mobile early when they realized where traffic was trending.

And they admitted that they make less on mobile because they have to pay companies like Apple to be the default search engine.....

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#109

Post by maxxxxx »

cambalache wrote: post #104
kyrra wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Around 13% of total revenue then, growing year on year, that's nice. I would like to know what percentage of net profit is contributed by that fraction.

It's very possible that they produce a lot of revenue but no profit like Uber. On the other hand I would assume Google Cloud is making money since Azura and AWS are profitable for MS and Amazon.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#110

Post by _asummers »

maxxxxx wrote: post #109
cambalache wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around 13% of total revenue then, growing year on year, that's nice. I would like to know what percentage of net profit is contributed by that fraction.

It's very possible that they produce a lot of revenue but no profit like Uber. On the other hand I would assume Google Cloud is making money since Azura and AWS are profitable for MS and Amazon.

Google has said that it's (at least) a billion per quarter. [0]

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/01/google-cloud-revenue-passes-...

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