Concept in Definition ABC

Although it may not seem like it, Google has not always been the first and almost monopolist seeker from Internet. Moreover, there was a time when there were search engines and Google did not yet exist, but Internet users could find other tools and indexes that allowed them to orient themselves by one incipient Internet.

One of these tools was Webcrawler. Another, which achieved a success that lasted until Google swept everything away, was Yahoo! This is his story.

Yahoo! was born as an index of web pages at Stanford University in 1994, by the hand of Jerry Yang and David Filo

Thus, initially it was not properly a search engine like Google, but one of the multiple indexes of pages, classified into categories and subcategories, in which any An Internet user could waste hours and hours browsing and discovering new sites to go to to find information about their hobbies, profession, or any other topic that interested.

Adding a keyword search engine was the logical next step, but Yahoo! it became a pure and simple search engine, but always, since its foundation, it was a portal that sought to bring information of all kinds to the Internet user.

Throughout the 1990s, Yahoo! became the starting point of navigation for a large number of Internet users, and as other companies did a posteriori, it sought to extend its tentacles to other areas of the world of internet. technology and the Internet, diversifying your business.

But Yahoo! was a victim of the so-called “dot com bubble”, in the framework of which Internet companies were widely overvalued and, consequently, their price stock exchange grew like foam.

When this bubble burst in 2000, Yahoo was worth about 7% of the maximum value it had reached.

The decline of Yahoo! As the main navigation home page, it was mainly caused by the irruption of Google in the search engine landscape

At the time, the clean page of Google (Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded the company in 1998, four years after the birth Yahoo!) was easy and fast to load, in contrast to the heavily populated, and consequently also considerably slower, Yahoo!

In addition, Yahoo! It was a good categorized index, but it had gaps in terms of search engine, gaps that they tried to alleviate by investing in external technology... specifically, in Google's, adopting the latter's search engine on its portal.

It is, to get an idea, as if Ford started selling cars produced by General Motors claiming that their engine is not that good. That if, the body and seats would continue to be Ford... What credibility could Ford have left after such an announcement?

Yahoo! dug his own grave by offering the Google search service, but he also did not know how to innovate and present some really disruptive online service as the company founded by Sergey Brin and Larry was doing Page

Yahoo! 'S proprietary search technology came into service in 2004, too late to change a downward course that had left the dominance of the Internet in the hands of Google.

In 2008 there was the famous unsolicited purchase offer by Microsoft

Which, as a collateral effect, caused the return to the highest positions responsibility of the company owned by Jerry Yang, one of the historic founders, although it was short-lived as the rejected offer divided the company's shareholders.

When Marissa Mayer took over in 2012, Yahoo! it seemed to revitalize; Mayer made some notorious acquisitions, and managed to return the storied company to the headlines of the specialized press, but for better and not for worse as in recent years before being designated as CEO.

Mayer's management, while considered correct, has not saved Yahoo! of the loss of your independence.

The North American operator Verizon announced its acquisition for just over 4.8 billion dollars

This is a figure quite far from the 44,000 million that Steve Ballmer offered for the multinational in 2008 and that, if they had been accepted, they would have converted to Yahoo! in a new acquisition-failure for Microsoft.

Photos: Fotolia - trokerr / nexusby

Topics on Yahoo!