Yahoo turns 10 this week. I remember when they came out. People really wondered whether they could be cooler than Scott Yanoff’s List. Back then Yanoff’s List was only on Gopher and Finger. Would this web thing REALLY take off?
Here’s a look at Yahoo from ’95. It was actually quite standards compliant. They stayed away from Netscape’s new "bgcolor" tag for years. It was quite nostalgic to see a grey background. But then with N3 I think they made the default background color be white, and ruined it all.
I never used Yahoo! much. In the beginning it was kind of handy, but then AOL came out with WebCrawler, which was a real internet search engine, and king in its day.
Today I was talking to Hannah, and mentioned how Yahoo got started, as the bookmark collection of a couple graduate students at Stanford. She said "Yahoo? How does that work? Yahoo is email."
That struck a deep chord with me as to how the Internet has changed.
I remember driving out to do some cross country skiing and listening to some people on NPR discuss search engines, explaining the difference between how sites made it onto their lists.
This was back when Yahoo had more than 40 paid websurfers with the responsibility to evaluate web sites to decide if they’re good enough to be listed with Yahoo.
Ed and Joe managed to get one on the list somehow. And then they took it down fairly soon afterwards…