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I think there's something to be said for focusing on what the market rewards, and clearly the market wasn't rewarding yahoo for having great technology in 1998.

I think there's something to be said for focusing on what the market rewards, and clearly the market wasn't rewarding yahoo for having great technology in 1998. Nor did it reward Google for having great enterprise search. You can't fault Jerry and David for not seeing search when the market had clearly supported banners with no basis for search as a viable model yet.

paul 16y ago
When did Google have great enterprise search?
- seregine 16y ago
  I remember trying a Google intranet search "appliance" around 2003 and it was way better than the previous (homebrew?) intranet search we had.
ams6110 16y ago
In 1998 the market was rewarding any and all comers with "dot-com" in their name, based on that and little else. It probably didn't matter much at all what Yahoo was doing or how they thought of themselves: they were one of the best-known .com companies at the time and that's all that really mattered. Speaking as a veteran of a .com that had $30MM of venture money literally handed to them in 1999 for a concept. No customers, no proven ability to implement the concept, no management that had ever attempted anything like it, etc. The money was gone in a little over a year, frittered away on lavish offices, a huge support organization (for no customers!), massively overbuilt technology infrastructure using the most expensive Sun servers, Cisco networking gear, triple-redundant everything. Very few tech companies, customers, or investors in that era had any real idea of what they were doing.
jeromec 16y ago
You can't fault Jerry and David for not seeing search when the market had clearly supported banners with no basis for search as a viable model yet. I disagree. Where were those banners shown? Search results pages. The reason people went to Yahoo! was to find stuff. That's the reason Yahoo! became Yahoo in the first place. The Yahoo founders made an invisible, scatterbrained web accessible by giving some sort of list index to it. Google later improved the sorting of the index, but Yahoo was first to build a large, searchable index.

paul 16y ago

When did Google have great enterprise search?

seregine 16y ago
I remember trying a Google intranet search "appliance" around 2003 and it was way better than the previous (homebrew?) intranet search we had.

ams6110 16y ago

In 1998 the market was rewarding any and all comers with "dot-com" in their name, based on that and little else. It probably didn't matter much at all what Yahoo was doing or how they thought of themselves: they were one of the best-known .com companies at the time and that's all that really mattered. Speaking as a veteran of a .com that had $30MM of venture money literally handed to them in 1999 for a concept. No customers, no proven ability to implement the concept, no management that had ever attempted anything like it, etc. The money was gone in a little over a year, frittered away on lavish offices, a huge support organization (for no customers!), massively overbuilt technology infrastructure using the most expensive Sun servers, Cisco networking gear, triple-redundant everything. Very few tech companies, customers, or investors in that era had any real idea of what they were doing.

jeromec 16y ago

You can't fault Jerry and David for not seeing search when the market had clearly supported banners with no basis for search as a viable model yet. I disagree. Where were those banners shown? Search results pages. The reason people went to Yahoo! was to find stuff. That's the reason Yahoo! became Yahoo in the first place. The Yahoo founders made an invisible, scatterbrained web accessible by giving some sort of list index to it. Google later improved the sorting of the index, but Yahoo was first to build a large, searchable index.