4 ms·

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 start

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".

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".