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from the do-you-know-anyone-who-uses-it? dept.
As part of an ongoing effort to streamline and focus its business, Yahoo today announced ( http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/98474044364/progress-report-continued-product-focus ) that it was retiring its namesake product at the end of the year.
In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo, graduate students at Stanford University, created a hierarchical directory of websites, "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." In March of that year, they gave it the name "Yahoo!," for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle."
In the early days of the Web, these categorized, human-curated Web listings were all the rage. Search engines existed, but rapidly became notorious for their poor result quality. On a Web that was substantially smaller than the one we enjoy today, directories were a useful alternative way of finding sites of interest.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 27 2014, @07:48PM
Cruising the financial news, I found this:
So, to fill in the "Yahoo is ___" blank, Yahoo is an ad host. They don't provide the analytics and consulting services that Google does, nor do they have the eye-bait that Google does, so "Google imitation also-ran" is pretty much on target. They might have started as a web directory, much as Google might have started as a search engine, but at their core, when you fill in the blank, they are both ad hosts.