Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Glory That Was Yahoo

fastcompany.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 150 posts

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#121

Post by setr »

brucephillips wrote: post #90
setr wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think useful in this case is pretty clear with the WD-40/duct tape example; hardly the best-in-class solution, but when you just need a simple, short-term solution, then Yahoo! should be the place to go. In the same fashion that excel is the default go-to tool for any kind of basic data management (and now to a certain degree superceded by google spreadsheets), Yahoo! would have been the default place to go basic i…

Ah, then "low end" is the more appropriate descriptor.

Well, low end but expansive in its utility. Useful like a swiss army knife

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#122

Post by dpark »

bigger_cheese wrote: post #114
eli wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes google was so much better than all those other sites it was like night and day. I was in high school at the time in the 90's. Where I lived the internet wasn't very widespread only place I could access it was via dial up in our school library I remember trying to do school projects having to go through the search engine dance you'd start by searching yahoo, then infoseek, then lycos, then altavista one by one slo…

That was pretty much my experience as well, though I was in college. Someone pointed me at Google when I was struggling to find something and it was just clearly so much better that I basically just never used Yahoo again.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#123

Post by tjalfi »

mooreds wrote: post #47
prostoalex wrote: post #45

> Yahoo Briefcase, for instance, did cloud storage long before the likes of Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive. Ha. Yahoo! had an internal idea portal and a review team. Expanding Y! Briefcase storage was the first thing I submitted to that portal upon joining the company in 2005 (I am sure I wasn't the first to think of it, but there was no way to see previously submitted stuff). The response from the ideas counsel was…

Has there ever been a time where a lawyer helped promote a new product idea? Seems like they are in the business of saying (kinda like accountants). This is a useful protective function, but can definitely cause stasis. Not sure how to balance it.

Two of the four founders of Intellectual Ventures were attorneys[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#124

Post by johnvanommen »

bigger_cheese wrote: post #114
eli wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes google was so much better than all those other sites it was like night and day. I was in high school at the time in the 90's. Where I lived the internet wasn't very widespread only place I could access it was via dial up in our school library I remember trying to do school projects having to go through the search engine dance you'd start by searching yahoo, then infoseek, then lycos, then altavista one by one slo…

Google built a better mousetrap.

This is a nice article, but the truth is that Yahoo is to Google as Myspace is to Facebook.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#125

Post by johnvanommen »

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.

IIRC, that was an acquisition. I interviewed there, they were a block away from Real Network in Seattle, and mostly consisted of alumni from there. In 2004, Real Network was A Big Deal.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#127

Post by Retra »

sixothree wrote: post #63
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.

To get an idea of where the search experience was when google came to market - they were the first ones to have the text cursor located in the search box. You didn't have to click the box before you started typing, your cursor was automatically placed in the correct place.

And most other search engines put ads on the main search page. Google just gave you a box. This was a big deal when you're on those old, slow connections. It was also less obtrusive and more classy.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#128

Post by emilsedgh »

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.

What they are doing is exactly the opposite of what grandparent claimed Yahoo did.

They just create things that are useful.

Search, GMail, Maps, Chrome, Android, Youtube, Analytics and many other products and services.

If they can milk them from advertising, they will. But they don't necessarily care if it doesn't make money directly.

They own so many crucial parts of the internet that they cannot become irrelevant like Yahoo did.

Compare that to similar companies.

Facebook has only Facebook.com, Whatsapp and Instagram (which is basically just Facebook)

Amazon their store and AWS. Their other attempts (phone, tablets, Alexa, etc) have never took off.

Microsoft is in a powerful position as they have Windows, Office, Azure, XBox and Bing although they have not managed to gain share in new markets for quite some time.

I think Google is by far the most relevant company on the internet.

They gain market and the cash will flow later. This is in their DNA. This is how exactly it got started for them.

Their search was popular but was not making money for years. All they did was to focus on making it better, thinking that they'll find a way to make money later. And they did.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#129

Post by CardenB »

dalbasal wrote: post #85
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…

Finance, news, fantasy-sports, email, messenger, groups, My Yahoo!, Delicious, Flickr... They're all useful. I agree these are useful, but they weren't very good businesses. Take email. Email is useful. Most of us use it every day, arguably for more important communications than facebook. Still, facebook is a massive business and email is barely a business at all, generally. Yahoo was blinkered by chances at big wins…

They didn’t need everything to be good business if they could build an ecosystem, as others have demonstrated. Google has done this well.

Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo

#130

Post by allenz »

prostoalex wrote: post #45

> Yahoo Briefcase, for instance, did cloud storage long before the likes of Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive. Ha. Yahoo! had an internal idea portal and a review team. Expanding Y! Briefcase storage was the first thing I submitted to that portal upon joining the company in 2005 (I am sure I wasn't the first to think of it, but there was no way to see previously submitted stuff). The response from the ideas counsel was…

That was probably the correct decision in 2005. Most file-sharing sites have gone out of business. The successful ones have distinguishing features. Box is still a B2B company, Drive benefits from synergy with the entire G Suite, and Dropbox's primary feature is sync.
Post reply on HN