> “We didn’t want to call it a portal, because a portal is a door to somewhere else, and we wanted people to stay there,” says Shannon Brayton, a senior manager in Yahoo’s corporate communications department from 1998 to 2001.
Of course the company that eventually killed them, Google, found its earliest success by explicitly rejecting this ethos. Google was a search engine, they didn't care if it sent you away; they wanted it to send you away, because that meant it was working. It meant you had found what you were looking for. A search engine's entire job is to send you away.
But then came AdWords and the IPO, both of which applied pressure on Google to become something else, something other than a search engine. Something that herded eyeballs together, rather than pushing them out. Something that eventually became what Google ironically is today: a better Yahoo than Yahoo ever was.
> Google was a search engine, they didn't care if it sent you away; they wanted it to send you away
... only seems obvious in hindsight, though. I worked for a string of internet companies in the late 90's back when people were still trying to figure out what an internet company was supposed to be. The biggest task that they consistently put on me, the tech guy who actually understood what "internet" meant, was making sure that users didn't use too much of the company's internet, because internet was expensive. When I first heard of MySpace, I was floored - they're just letting people upload stuff to their servers? Like... whatever they want? As often as they want? They don't charge each individual user by the individual byte? This was heresy! (And then I checked to see if they were hiring...)
Of course the company that eventually killed them, Google, found its earliest success by explicitly rejecting this ethos. Google was a search engine, they didn't care if it sent you away; they wanted it to send you away, because that meant it was working. It meant you had found what you were looking for. A search engine's entire job is to send you away.
But then came AdWords and the IPO, both of which applied pressure on Google to become something else, something other than a search engine. Something that herded eyeballs together, rather than pushing them out. Something that eventually became what Google ironically is today: a better Yahoo than Yahoo ever was.