Most of us now know and use google but before google, there was yahoo
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No one saw this coming because yahoo was doing great and fine, it even seemed impossible to be overtaking by any competitor whatsoever.
So, what happened to yahoo search directory?
In the race for business success and survival amongst internet search companies, Yahoo was way out in front. And most analyst viewed yahoo search directory as the brand to beat.
Just few years ago, yahoo was a pet project of tow Stanford university PhD candidates who lived in a trailer. In 1994, cofounders jerry Yang and David filo were supposed to be doing research on a computer-aided design of semiconductor circuits. Instead, they whiled away the school days creating a directory that catalogued web sites according according to a filing system they made up.
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They published their directory tree on the web, calling their site jerry and David's guide to the world wide web.
Net-heads flocked to the site and fill and yang gave up their doctorial studies to concentrate on expanding the guide, which they renamed Yahoo ( for yet another hierarchic officious oracle).
In April 1995, they raised $1 million in venture funding from Sequoia capital and moved out of the trailer and into a real office in mountain view California.
One year later, the two were worth $132 million each, today, yahoo employs thousands of staffs, topping the list is president and CEO Tim koogle, a veteran at Motorola.
Koogle runs the business, freeing yang to handle the press and investors while fill a chief yahoo of technology remains shackled to the companies server.
At the start, the strategy was simple: push the brand, luckily for them Netscape's Marc Anderson was so impressed by the yahoo search directory that, back in January 1995, he made yahoo the default directory for Netscape's Navigator browser,
Users who clicked on the net search button at the top of their browsers were automatically routed to yahoo.
The arrangement ended when Netscape charged yahoo and other search directory $5 million a year to rent a space behind the net search button,
But it helped made yahoo famous on the web.
The service now receives more than two million visitors daily, who access the site more than 14 million times according to Jupiter, more than 75% of those visitors came from individuals who have bookmarked or otherwise chosen the Yahoo search directory as their main search engine.
Yang's push to turn yahoo into a brand that stands for more than searching will be helped by the Company's alliance with softbank, a Japanese media conglomerate.
Softbank added to it's burgeoning internet portfolio by paying $106 million for a 35% stake in Yahoo.
Was this deal a bad one for Yahoo? Or was google that good?
Let's continue,
Yahoo got into television as a provider of technology information for local newscasts, but most of it's budding media ventures are online.
The goal is to transform Yahoo's web directory into what web-heads call " a destination "
A site where a visitor will stay to browse a number of pages, rather than just one, keeping customers longer helps sell ads and so does going local.
So far, the ambitious effort has neither produced profits nor revitalized the share price, nor has it fundamentally altered the perception of Yahoo.
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