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Yahoo failed because they were a directory service that saw the search box as less relevant. Google recognized that searching is the human approach, not orderin
by sys_64738 8y ago
Yahoo failed because they were a directory service that saw the search box as less relevant. Google recognized that searching is the human approach, not ordering stuff into folders, which is an obsessive compulsive trait.
- abruzzi 8y agoCategorization and catalogs go back centuries so I don’t think I’d call it an OCD trait. Early search engines (90s) were very bad, the change that caught Yahoo was the quality of search. I remember doing searches on altavista, getting a million hits, and at least the first dozen were nothing but log files. The game changer for search was its ability to prioritize relevant content over accidental matches. That started training us to search, which was a new way to interact with information. You couldn’t search an printed encyclopedia. In the 90s Yahoo was much more useful than Webcrawler.
- hasbot 8y agoThe other game changer was speed. Altavista and other early search engines were incredibly slow.