Yahoo's MO at the time was to swap in the current "cool kid" of algorithmic search to fill out Yahoo's own search results. Google didn't really have much of a b

Yahoo's MO at the time was to swap in the current "cool kid" of algorithmic search to fill out Yahoo's own search results. Google didn't really have much of a business outside of selling their results to folks like Yahoo, so I think many logical minds would've agreed that Google was heading for failure--short of being acquired by Yahoo or something other big guy in search. At the least, you'd have a hard time making a believable argument that they'd be making billions of dollars a year in less than a half decade. And, truthfully, an even harder time trying to make that same sort of argument if they were actually acquired by Yahoo.