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.

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.