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 usin

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.