4 ms·

"Arguably, Yahoo was unfixable. The company’s DNA and technology were built around its original identity as a web portal" I have a theory that there's always a

by smoyer 9y ago

"Arguably, Yahoo was unfixable. The company’s DNA and technology were built around its original identity as a web portal" I have a theory that there's always at least one big web portal - AOL started as a dial-up ISP and turned into a portal. Yahoo started as a search engine and turned into a portal. Facebook started as a social network and turned into a portal.

mattmanser 9y ago
As far as I remember, Yahoo was a portal first and foremost, it didn't start with a search engine. The quick googling I just did seems to confirm that, it started as a human curated directory and didn't start crawling till 2002 (and almost bought Google at that point).
- mcherm 9y ago
  It makes me feel old when people talk about doing historical research on events that I lived through. When yahoo first started out (and at that time I was using it) the role it played was equivalent to that which search engines play today. At that point in time there were no search engines, the only way to know about a website was to already have the address, or two read someplace that referenced or linked to it. Yahoo was initially "just a list of websites" but the role it played was very much the role that Google plays for so many people today: the site you start out on, and the place you go if you want to find something on the Internet. They eventually lost that role to search engines like Alta Vista, and later incarnations of Yahoo became a"Portal": a site you go to because it has decent implementations of many different features such as news, movie listings, stock quotes, and everything else that Yahoo offers.
  - mgkimsal 9y ago
    "Yahoo was initially "just a list of websites" but the role it played was very much the role that Google plays for so many people today" More specifically - you went there and could "search" the directory. You put in a word or phrase and it searched the directory listings to find matches. It was just only searching its own very limited set of info, vs a crawled index of all the content of the sites. IIRC, they'd also started charging ($250 IIRC?) for adding a listing to their directory sometime in the late 90s or so.
    - jaredsohn 9y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory says $299 per year; also this page says that it just went away in 2014.
- smoyer 9y ago
  Interesting ... I remember only trying it as a search engine alongside AltaVista and a couple others. I guess I never realized it was human-curated. I didn't (and still don't) use portal sites - I use pinboard for bookmarks and have my on-line life organized through links and tags. I was commenting to someone the other day that I still have friends with AOL email addresses. In the BBS days, that was how those without Internet access could communicate with those that were "surfin' the net".
yomly 9y ago
Your comment reminds me of this: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/12/ratio-technology-mozilla-firefox-os-90-9-1 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/12/ratio-tec... Is it the nature of network effects that drives this somewhat characteristic industry dynamic?
gcb0 9y ago
the correct name is Audience Monopoly. Which so far have been relatively transient.
rsync 9y ago
"I have a theory that there's always at least one big web portal - AOL started as a dial-up ISP and turned into a portal. Yahoo started as a search engine and turned into a portal. Facebook started as a social network and turned into a portal." It goes deeper than that ... the trend is not to become a portal but rather, to become "the phone company". Everyone is trying to become "the phone company" in which they attain a central, monopoly position through which all communication takes place. Google and Facebook are currently fighting for that spot. They're trying to become AOL, but more deeply, like AOL before them, they're all just trying to become ma bell. This is very convincingly explained in the very highly regarded book _The Master Switch_, by Tim Wu.

by smoyer 9y ago

mattmanser 9y ago

As far as I remember, Yahoo was a portal first and foremost, it didn't start with a search engine. The quick googling I just did seems to confirm that, it started as a human curated directory and didn't start crawling till 2002 (and almost bought Google at that point).

mcherm 9y ago
It makes me feel old when people talk about doing historical research on events that I lived through. When yahoo first started out (and at that time I was using it) the role it played was equivalent to that which search engines play today. At that point in time there were no search engines, the only way to know about a website was to already have the address, or two read someplace that referenced or linked to it. Yahoo was initially "just a list of websites" but the role it played was very much the role that Google plays for so many people today: the site you start out on, and the place you go if you want to find something on the Internet. They eventually lost that role to search engines like Alta Vista, and later incarnations of Yahoo became a"Portal": a site you go to because it has decent implementations of many different features such as news, movie listings, stock quotes, and everything else that Yahoo offers.
- mgkimsal 9y ago
  "Yahoo was initially "just a list of websites" but the role it played was very much the role that Google plays for so many people today" More specifically - you went there and could "search" the directory. You put in a word or phrase and it searched the directory listings to find matches. It was just only searching its own very limited set of info, vs a crawled index of all the content of the sites. IIRC, they'd also started charging ($250 IIRC?) for adding a listing to their directory sometime in the late 90s or so.
  - jaredsohn 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory says $299 per year; also this page says that it just went away in 2014.
smoyer 9y ago
Interesting ... I remember only trying it as a search engine alongside AltaVista and a couple others. I guess I never realized it was human-curated. I didn't (and still don't) use portal sites - I use pinboard for bookmarks and have my on-line life organized through links and tags. I was commenting to someone the other day that I still have friends with AOL email addresses. In the BBS days, that was how those without Internet access could communicate with those that were "surfin' the net".

yomly 9y ago

Your comment reminds me of this: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/12/ratio-technology-mozilla-firefox-os-90-9-1 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/12/ratio-tec... Is it the nature of network effects that drives this somewhat characteristic industry dynamic?

gcb0 9y ago

the correct name is Audience Monopoly. Which so far have been relatively transient.

rsync 9y ago

"I have a theory that there's always at least one big web portal - AOL started as a dial-up ISP and turned into a portal. Yahoo started as a search engine and turned into a portal. Facebook started as a social network and turned into a portal." It goes deeper than that ... the trend is not to become a portal but rather, to become "the phone company". Everyone is trying to become "the phone company" in which they attain a central, monopoly position through which all communication takes place. Google and Facebook are currently fighting for that spot. They're trying to become AOL, but more deeply, like AOL before them, they're all just trying to become ma bell. This is very convincingly explained in the very highly regarded book _The Master Switch_, by Tim Wu.