Summary:
As the early web grows, the explosion of content and websites creates chaos. Early search engines are among the most popular sites on the early web, as users try to find their way around the new medium. Sites like Excite, Lycos, Alta Vista and others try to take an algorithm and data-based route to organizing the chaos, but the site that leaps to the front of the pack, Yahoo!, goes in the other direction, creating a hand-sorted directory.
We learn how Jerry Yang and David Filo started Yahoo! in a trailer on the campus of Stanford University and prepare to make the first great brand of the Internet Era.
Listen:
Bibliography:
- http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-out-looking-like-a-toy/
- Gainesville Sun, July 31, 1995 http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1320&dat=19950731&id=MENWAAAAIBAJ&sjid=k-oDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3855,7057240
- http://stuff.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/web-growth-summary.html
- http://www.cybertelecom.org/dns/history.htm
- http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.01/excite.html
- http://www.businessweek.com/stories/1996-02-11/what-hath-yahoo-wrought
- http://www.thinkpink.com/bp/WebCrawler/History.html
- http://www.wordstream.com/articles/internet-search-engines-history
- http://web.archive.org/web/20090501140446/http://www.clubi.ie/webserch/engines/infoseek/history.htm
- http://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/18/business/digital-equipment-offers-web-browsers-its-super-spider.html
- http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2215868/53-of-Organic-Search-Clicks-Go-to-First-Link-Study
- http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1998/03/02/238576/
- “Found You On Yahoo” Red Herring, October 1, 1995
- http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1998/03/02/238576/
- Yang, Jerry; Filo, David; Yahoo! Unplugged: Your Discovery Guide to the Web
- Reid, Robert H.; Architects of the Web: 1,000 Days that Built the Future of Business
- Kaplan, Philip J.; F’d Companies: Spectacular Dot-com Flameouts
- Angel, Karen; Inside Yahoo!: Reinvention and the Road Ahead
[…] original podcast episodes that the above post was transcribed from are here and here. There are plenty more details I left out for brevity in this […]
This brought back fond memories of typing in akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo hundreds of times. It cannot be overstated enough just how silly it was trying to remember all the different sites there were on the Internet. We take for granted now it will be easy to Google something to get back to it, but once you found a good website in the early 90s it was really a gem to hold onto.
Indeed. The first website I ever published in 1996 got listed on Yahoo. In my memory, the email announcing the listing came from Jerry Yang himself. But that’s probably a false memory. 🙂