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!!
The Glory That Was Yahoo
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Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo
#32Once 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!!
Why and why it's interesting?
Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guessing you’re young / missed the beginning of the net, because that’s when yahoo was king.
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 logical table of contents quickly. Then the web exploded (gopher was already all but dead) and it wasn't possible for yahoo to keep up, at which point search became the only hope.
If Altavista hadn't quit updating their index for several months, they could have killed google just by keeping their index up to date and continuously refining their search algorithm. Of course this last is speculation but it is reasonable, google wasn't that much better.
Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo
#34IT'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…
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.
Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo
#35Once 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.
Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo
#36I 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 ;-)
Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo
#37The 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…
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.
Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo
#38What 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.
The free email account at Yahoo was a nice one too. The web client was really nicely done.
Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo
#39Yahoo Labs was innovative and inspiring. They seemed to make stuff that was useful, wasn't killed immediately and had an independent life. I don't think today's tech behemoths can approach where they were. Maybe it was just the frontier back then...
Re: The Glory That Was Yahoo
#40Earlier 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.
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...