10 Years That Rocked The World
Yahoo! incorporated in 1995, the year I discovered the World Wide Web. That year, I made a decision that changed my life: I dared myself to use the Web to find a job on the Internet. I was a natural-born information junkie who could read, write, edit, and catalog–and fearlessly follow hyperlinks wherever they might lead.
I bought a fast Pentium running shiny new Windows 95. I got ISDN. I downloaded each new beta browser. In early 1996, I was hired to build a directory of web sites for one of Yahoo!’s now vanished competitors. I stepped into the fast-moving current, riding wave after wave of discovery, gathering a daily catch of tools and trinkets: image maps, javascripts, dancing widgets, canonical lists of nearly everything. I was getting paid to websurf!
In those days, we studied Yahoo! to see how directory was done. I walked the tree, and pondered colon classification and what it meant that Ranganathan was a Yahoo!. Web search scaled and evolved quickly to colonize the new info landscape, but the algorithms were young, and results were erratic and sometimes surprisingly irrelevant.
Yahoo! hired me on my third try, in 1998. The Web seemed vast, but finite. We still believed there was an end of the Internet. Then, as now, the Yahoo! Directory exemplified the value of informed human intervention, aggregating and organizing the best of the Web, creating choice out of chaos. And Yahoo! was fast, free, and fun, with invisible, reliable, leading-edge technology.
Over the past seven years, it’s been a privilege to participate as Yahoo! and the Web grew up together. Through the tumultuous boom and bust years, search technology thrived. Yahoo! enjoyed a succession of relationships with great search providers. Then, more recently, we reinvented ourselves and launched Yahoo! Search Technology.
These days, search engine is a household word. The power of search has captured the public imagination and become essential in the lives of millions. And though we’re continually innovating, we’ve just begun to explore the multi-faceted, multimedia knowledge exchange that becomes possible when search technologies mature and get smarter. Stay tuned.
And now it’s time to celebrate. You’re invited to Yahoo!’s 10th birthday party. There’s even a present waiting for you there. Feeling nostalgic? Don’t miss our amazing, entertaining web installation, Netrospective: 10 years, 100 moments of the Web. We’d love to hear from you.
Havi Hoffman
Yahoo! Editorial
Yahoo was the worlds best search engine, but now google is. Yahoo makes up for this with their other services.
Netrospective was awesome! I blogged about it here.
http://jdk.phpkid.org/index.php?p=1186
Btw, can we put the ‘We WERE’, ‘WE ARE’ pictures on the web? Russell has one picture on his post – http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008337.html – and I would like to see more! :)
JD
Miss working there! Had loads of fun when I was there. Happy Birthday Yahoo! !!!
I’m not convinced at Yahoo’s new approach to things. I believe Yahoo are making mistakes. Yahoo obviously had big meetings in 2003, in which to decide how to take Yahoo forward from 2004 onwards. I’ve been with Yahoo all the way, but in 2005, I think Yahoo! is confusing the consumer, but dangling or bombarding the consumer with useful but not essential products, features, services. I’m not just addressing Yahoo Search here. I’m talking about Yahoo’s shift in style from the date beginning summer 2004 onwards. I know Yahoo inside out. Thats marketing, advertising, product design, goals, and strategies, as well as the wallstreet scene. I also know Yahoo’s security inside and out, but I won’t go into that at the moment. Anyway, I don’t share the same feeling of celebration for Yahoo’s 10th Birthday. The free ice cream offer is also bad business sense. Once you buy ice cream, you eat it or it melts. Yahoo gets nothing out of it. If Yahoo had given away free mouse mats (for example) to every user, it would have been more useful to computer users, and have a great PR and advertising for Yahoo. Aren’t Americans already the obese, without giving them more food? Yahoo isn’t involved with food products, so the ice cream idea, serves no real purpose to Yahoo users or Yahoo’s revenue. Imagine all those mouse mats on everyones desktop for months/years after todays birthday. What a great opportunity for Yahoo missed. Sometimes I don’t get Yahoo’s way of thinking. Especially recently.
P.S: Send me a mouse mat if you’ve got a spare one kicking around the cubes. ;-)
Hit me up on Yahoo! Messenger for off-blog discussion about Yahoo’s future.
Cheers.
You so much proud on Yahoo Directory. Please, ask your Boss to let people build directory based on Yahoo Directory. Just like people build directory based on Dmoz.org.
Yahoo already have http://dir.yahoo.com/ which is a very comprehensive directory thats been around as long as Yahoo, and recently Yahoo introduced http://mysearch.yahoo.com You can’t get much better than that.
May I disagree with the first comment (by Michael)?
>Yahoo was the worlds best search engine, but now google is.
I think that Yahoo is catching up, while Google does not improve much. In addition, Google does not seem quite sincere about its self-reported figures. You can check my study here and you will see that Yahoo probably indexes more pages than Google:
http://aixtal.blogspot.com/2005/03/web-yahoo-indexes-more-pages-than.html
http://www.yahoowars.com/index.php?q1=ysearchblog&q2=blogger , found this interesting fun tool
Happy Birthday Yahoo!
I’ve been on the net since the early 90’s and have been using Yahoo all these years. Feels like attending a kid brother’s birthday bash!
I also like google better overall. yahoo seems like its trying to hard to do everything and less focus is on their niche.
Happy Birthday.
I don’t think Google is the best, lately is making great changes every month on his search results. (but of course, is one of the bests)
Are you really planning guys what only seems a rumour? in SEW Blog…
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050309-105943
ttt