Beak orders Yahoo! to get on with Microsoft Search rollout in Asia Yahoo! has been ordered by a US judge to get on with the rollout of Microsoft Search in Hong Kong and Taiwan as per their partnership deal. The Purple Palace had tried to delay the deployment of Microsoft's search tech in the markets, claiming that chief exec Marissa Mayer was keen to discuss things with the successor to …
Yahoo has acted as a front end for various search engines during the last 20 years but I don't recall it providing its own search.
What it is and was is a portal. It provides hosted information and entertainment and content branded and aggregated across its sites. Yahoo is good at it but the fashion changed. Along with AOL Lycos and many others they opened up the web for mere mortals in the early days. When Google appeared the portal model was broken. Google search worked well enough - a portal to hold your hand became less relevant - visitor numbers declined over time and in turn advertising revenue dropped.
I'd hate to be stuck with Microsoft though...
OK - Yahoo was certainly the dominant internet directory early on, say 90s to about 2001. So not a search engine per se, but the dominant way for people to find stuff on the webs.
The idea of internet librarians, editors Yahoo called them, actually reviewing each site and writing a description seems quaint, but that's how it started.
Google was built by Yahoo starting to use their algorithmic search to supplement their directory - they put "powered by Google" on each and every search results page. So people went straight to the source. How to, Howitzer style, blow your own foot, calf and leg off.
Yahoo has never since found its mojo again. They stumble around, drunk on their heritage, in search for a purpose.
"Mayer saying earlier this year that the deal hasn't brought in the money or the market share the firm was hoping for"
Yahoo execs discover something everyone could have predicted long before the deal was signed. Honestly what kind of koolaid were they drinking in the first place?
Were they hoping that some hitherto undiscovered phenomenon would transmute 2 piles of shite into a giant pile of gold?
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