4 ms·

So did Yahoo have a bigger impact on the 90s than Google on the modern generation of the internet? It sounds like Yahoo created a lot of the products we use tod

by QML 8y ago

So did Yahoo have a bigger impact on the 90s than Google on the modern generation of the internet? It sounds like Yahoo created a lot of the products we use today but Google incrementally improved them.

77pt77 8y ago
No. Google's impact is colossally larger. But in the 90s they had no real competition and some of their products were actually pretty good and convenient given the limitations of the time. Everyday I woke up with a phone call from yahoo at my chosen time telling me how many unread emails I had, the weather for that day and what events my calendar had. All went to waste...
mywittyname 8y ago
Google invented search as we know it. Before that, search results were basically paid advertisement followed by some links to tangentially-related pages. Searching wasn't really an expected use-case, IIRC, Yahoo was modeled more closely to a digital Yellow Pages than a search engine. That's apparently one of the reasons Amazon picked a name starting with an A. Yahoo turned down the option to buy early Google. They didn't see the value in search because it would take users away from their site. They wanted users to stay on their site and participate in discussions and such.
dredmorbius 8y ago
Tough call. Yahoo was "the Internet's homepage" (before Reddit co-opted that), and was, when keyword-based search was kind of sucky and already getting gamed (HTML "keyword" headers, if anyone remembers those, Lycos, HotBot, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, ...) a pretty good way to find things. The Yahoo directory itself (Yang's Hierarchical Officious Oracle or Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle) was carried forward for a while as DMOZ (since killed), and has certain similarities to Wikipedia, though that focuses on knowledge and not necessarily webpages. To that extent, I find Wikipedia more useful today, because it tells me what I'm looking to find out, rather than directing me to some page, which may, or quite probably, may not, have what I'm looking for. And in either case, almost certainly assaults my senses. Yahoo also served as an information hub. Before there was Google News, there was Yahoo News, Yahoo Weather, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Maps (I think). One of the first online web-based email services (and still a large, though declining, share of the market, along with Aol and Hotmail, along with a few other relics). The consumerisation of Yahoo was already turning me off by the late 1990s, and I remember running across the first print magazine pushing that side of the company in San Francisco in the late 1990s / early 2000s, and deciding that the company had jumped the shark so far as I was concerned. I've always lead the crowd.... (I'm not bragging. I'm saying that if I predict something, give it another 20 years. Though I occasionally get closer the mark.) At the time, there wasn't anything on the Open Web that was close. There were entirely closed portals, most especially AOL, and other early online services (Prodigy, CompuServ, etc.). But the idea of one place you could go for all of that, no. Yahoo started the Portal Wars. (Best rejoinder ever: "My ass is a portal". One version of that (from 1999, and, of course, /.), here: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/99/03/04/1128220/redhats-new-web-site https://linux.slashdot.org/story/99/03/04/1128220/redhats-ne... So, at the time, Yahoo was huge. And the Internet was tremendously smaller than today -- about 100x fewer people online then than now -- call it 30 million rather than 3 billion users. Today, a social site with "only" 30 million MUA is considered a failure or minor player.

by QML 8y ago

77pt77 8y ago

No. Google's impact is colossally larger. But in the 90s they had no real competition and some of their products were actually pretty good and convenient given the limitations of the time. Everyday I woke up with a phone call from yahoo at my chosen time telling me how many unread emails I had, the weather for that day and what events my calendar had. All went to waste...

mywittyname 8y ago

Google invented search as we know it. Before that, search results were basically paid advertisement followed by some links to tangentially-related pages. Searching wasn't really an expected use-case, IIRC, Yahoo was modeled more closely to a digital Yellow Pages than a search engine. That's apparently one of the reasons Amazon picked a name starting with an A. Yahoo turned down the option to buy early Google. They didn't see the value in search because it would take users away from their site. They wanted users to stay on their site and participate in discussions and such.

dredmorbius 8y ago

Tough call. Yahoo was "the Internet's homepage" (before Reddit co-opted that), and was, when keyword-based search was kind of sucky and already getting gamed (HTML "keyword" headers, if anyone remembers those, Lycos, HotBot, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, ...) a pretty good way to find things. The Yahoo directory itself (Yang's Hierarchical Officious Oracle or Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle) was carried forward for a while as DMOZ (since killed), and has certain similarities to Wikipedia, though that focuses on knowledge and not necessarily webpages. To that extent, I find Wikipedia more useful today, because it tells me what I'm looking to find out, rather than directing me to some page, which may, or quite probably, may not, have what I'm looking for. And in either case, almost certainly assaults my senses. Yahoo also served as an information hub. Before there was Google News, there was Yahoo News, Yahoo Weather, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Maps (I think). One of the first online web-based email services (and still a large, though declining, share of the market, along with Aol and Hotmail, along with a few other relics). The consumerisation of Yahoo was already turning me off by the late 1990s, and I remember running across the first print magazine pushing that side of the company in San Francisco in the late 1990s / early 2000s, and deciding that the company had jumped the shark so far as I was concerned. I've always lead the crowd.... (I'm not bragging. I'm saying that if I predict something, give it another 20 years. Though I occasionally get closer the mark.) At the time, there wasn't anything on the Open Web that was close. There were entirely closed portals, most especially AOL, and other early online services (Prodigy, CompuServ, etc.). But the idea of one place you could go for all of that, no. Yahoo started the Portal Wars. (Best rejoinder ever: "My ass is a portal". One version of that (from 1999, and, of course, /.), here: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/99/03/04/1128220/redhats-new-web-site https://linux.slashdot.org/story/99/03/04/1128220/redhats-ne... So, at the time, Yahoo was huge. And the Internet was tremendously smaller than today -- about 100x fewer people online then than now -- call it 30 million rather than 3 billion users. Today, a social site with "only" 30 million MUA is considered a failure or minor player.