Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008) • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)

#161

Post by selectodude » Mon, May 03, 2021, 8:32 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #120

Latour wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A primary benefit of Android is that Google is allowed to put their search engine on Android mobile devices for close to free instead of multiple billions of dollars.

If Apple customers are the most affluent and are worth at least $12 billion a year to Google, how much are the statistically less affluent Android users really worth? How much are customers buying $200 phones worth to advertisers compared to customers paying 3 times as much? Google also has to pay third party Android OEMs a share of search revenue.

I would imagine a lot of it is mindshare. Apple is trendy and had already called their bluff once and made Bing the default search engine for a time.

Google pays Apple to make Google the search engine on the iPhone for the same reason that Coca Cola and Anheiseur-Busch spend tens of millions per year on 30 second spots during the Super Bowl.

Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)

#162

Post by cbsmith » Mon, May 03, 2021, 8:50 PM UTC

chaostheory wrote: post #156

cbsmith wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google's origin story doesn't seem relevant to me, in that Google won because they made radical leaps forward in search quality, compute cost, and and compute scale. That's the myth, but it's pretty far from the reality. Long before Google became such a dominant player, competing search engines had matched or exceeded its quality, compute cost, and ability to scale. > All at a time when the web was exploding: only…

> That's the myth, but it's pretty far from the reality. Long before Google became such a dominant player, competing search engines had matched or exceeded its quality, compute cost, and ability to scale. I disagree. Inktomi, Altavista, and AllTheWeb weren't even close in terms of search result revelance and the number of pages they indexed. Every time they attempted to close the gap, Google would just widen it with…

You're certainly welcome to disagree, but Google would be the first to tell you how relevant the number of pages indexed would be.

When you actually measured the result relevance number, it turned out that all the major engines were pretty similar, and Google often was not the top one. More importantly though, the observed phenomenon was that no matter how bad the results you presented were, most people didn't switch to another search engine.

I get that you're a Google fan, but GMail & Maps weren't part of the search engine. Ironically "real time search" was rolled out as a PR move to counteract the narrative that was being constructed at the time: that Google was falling behind UX innovations in the search engine space. All of the above were rolled out after Google was the dominant player in the search space.

Google has absolutely done some amazing things, and their search team is second to none, but the narrative that they became the dominant player because of their technical advantages is very misleading.

Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)

#163

Post by cbsmith » Mon, May 03, 2021, 8:52 PM UTC

coryrc wrote: post #144

cbsmith wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google's origin story doesn't seem relevant to me, in that Google won because they made radical leaps forward in search quality, compute cost, and and compute scale. That's the myth, but it's pretty far from the reality. Long before Google became such a dominant player, competing search engines had matched or exceeded its quality, compute cost, and ability to scale. > All at a time when the web was exploding: only…

I was an AltaVista user. Then I started having to use a meta search. Then Google came along and it always worked. Who cares if the others caught up? I had no reason to look for over a decade. But now I feel the amount of money to be made means search will never be good again: you can pay people pennies to get a few more pennies for yourself, just to bury the better stuff given freely.

I think you accurately captured the reality of the context. For the most part, as long as people perceive they are getting a good search result, they aren't to look at other options, let alone switch.

Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)

#164

Post by cbsmith » Mon, May 03, 2021, 8:55 PM UTC

Bukhmanizer wrote: post #131

cbsmith wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is doing that (particularly with YouTube), as is everyone else. I don't think they break down the search vs. other ad business any more, but at last check it was still the biggest single source of revenue for the company (admittedly, I believe YouTube and adsense collectively generate more revenue for them now, but both of these are primarily showing ads on other people's content).

Ah ok, so her strategy was to pull out on search, but focus on higher quality/yield ads? It still seems like a bit of a losing strategy as I don’t see any reason for people to stay with Yahoo.

Yahoo at the time was #1 in a number of categories, including fantasy sports, finance, etc. In other areas they were #2 and the marginal value of being #1 vs. #2 wasn't nearly as great as in search. The focus wasn't so much higher quality/yield ads (I mean, that was there, but everyone was always looking for that), but investing in other kinds of online services that would get a better ROI.

Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)

#165

Post by sillysaurusx » Mon, May 03, 2021, 9:13 PM UTC

tolbish wrote: post #73

kreeben wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are flabbergasted by the fact Yahoo, and everyone else for that matter, thought it absolutely impossible to disrupt Google (except for perhaps a handful of hubris-riddled people at MS), please remember the general sentiment HN used to have towards Google who according to us, at that time, could do no wrong. They were infallible. They were the brightest people in the world. They were The Good Guy (TM). They wer…

Tabbed browsing and incognito mode were incredibly innovative. edit - Looks like Firefox introduced both. But Chrome was incredible in comparison at the time. I recall thinking Firefox was no longer worth it. I made the move back to Firefox a few years ago.

I have no idea why you’re completely annihilated in downvotes. You’re right, at least about the incognito mode. I clearly remember chrome introducing this with a blog post or something; my boss at the time even joked that they used an example of “secretly buying a gift for someone” instead of all the dirty, dirty porn you want to watch.

Tabbed browsing, no idea though.

No one is claiming chrome invented the concept of incognito mode. It was just executed incredibly well.

Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)

#166

Post by wpietri » Mon, May 03, 2021, 9:38 PM UTC

cbsmith wrote: post #78

wpietri wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you on almost all of this, but can you explain why you think it's incorrect that Yahoo wouldn't have to spend a lot of money to keep up with Google? Google's origin story doesn't seem relevant to me, in that Google won because they made radical leaps forward in search quality, compute cost, and and compute scale. As well as company culture around innovation/continuous improvement, I suspect. All at a time wh…

> Google's origin story doesn't seem relevant to me, in that Google won because they made radical leaps forward in search quality, compute cost, and and compute scale. That's the myth, but it's pretty far from the reality. Long before Google became such a dominant player, competing search engines had matched or exceeded its quality, compute cost, and ability to scale. > All at a time when the web was exploding: only…

Thanks for the detailed reply.

> Long before Google became such a dominant player, competing search engines had matched or exceeded its quality, compute cost, and ability to scale.

Could you say more about this? I wasn't involved, but my recollection is that Google pioneered using a zillion low-cost nodes for search. E.g., I remember that AltaVista was using a big iron approach partly as a way of showing off DEC's wares. I can believe everybody had to try to keep up, but I am skeptical that Google slowed down enough for everybody else to catch up and/or surpass them.

Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)

#167

Post by tolbish » Mon, May 03, 2021, 9:41 PM UTC

cxr wrote: post #141

alexjplant wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Revisionist history... Firefox and loads of niche browsers (MyIE2/Maxthon which I used in the era where IE was sometimes mandatory for site compatibility) had tabbed browsing.

Indeed, it would be nice if the tendency of people to jump into a conversation and start spewing absolute nonsense were subject to harsher social consequences. But it was not just niche browsers. By the time of Chrome's debut (2008), just about every browser had tabs—including Internet Explorer: "With the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, all major web browsers featured a tabbed interface." https://en.wikipedia…

What punishment would be harsh enough in your eyes for the grave mistake of correcting a wrong memory?

Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)

#168

Post by chaostheory » Mon, May 03, 2021, 9:49 PM UTC

cbsmith wrote: post #162

chaostheory wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the myth, but it's pretty far from the reality. Long before Google became such a dominant player, competing search engines had matched or exceeded its quality, compute cost, and ability to scale. I disagree. Inktomi, Altavista, and AllTheWeb weren't even close in terms of search result revelance and the number of pages they indexed. Every time they attempted to close the gap, Google would just widen it with…

You're certainly welcome to disagree, but Google would be the first to tell you how relevant the number of pages indexed would be. When you actually measured the result relevance number, it turned out that all the major engines were pretty similar, and Google often was not the top one. More importantly though, the observed phenomenon was that no matter how bad the results you presented were, most people didn't switch…

I am no longer a Google fan. Haven't been for years so there's no bias.

> More importantly though, the observed phenomenon was that no matter how bad the results you presented were, most people didn't switch to another search engine.

That may be the case today because the results are similar now, but it wasn't the same case years ago. The ancient search engines prior to Google weren't much better than human curated directories like Yahoo. Otherwise, why would anyone switch from them to Google?

Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)

#169

Post by twobitshifter » Mon, May 03, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

hogFeast wrote: post #90

Bukhmanizer wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Long before Google became such a dominant player, competing search engines had matched or exceeded its quality, compute cost, and ability to scale. Just curious, which ones? I remember Google felt so far above any other search engine for a very long time.

Essentially all of their tech was taken from Robin Li and AltaVista/DEC. Brin did a lot of the implementation work, Page did nothing (a lot of the work he did do, didn't scale, and was highly inferior to existing work as he wasn't a strong programmer...I think he provided a server room or something, he was the snake oil salesman). The actual technological innovation in the search product was minimal (the stuff they d…

Behind every great fortune there is a crime.

Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)

#170

Post by Aa9C4xPz43Gg7k6 » Mon, May 03, 2021, 10:03 PM UTC

xxpor wrote: post #75

tolbish wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tabbed browsing and incognito mode were incredibly innovative. edit - Looks like Firefox introduced both. But Chrome was incredible in comparison at the time. I recall thinking Firefox was no longer worth it. I made the move back to Firefox a few years ago.

FF had tabbed browsing for years before Chrome ever showed up.

And also had single process model which failed completely when you had 50 tabs and Youtube etc. implemented in Flash. Main tab use case being unusable around the time Chrome came out was what motivated me to switch. Also, extensions getting broken at each update.