The Decline of Yahoo!...What Happened?

Yahoo: You Always Have Other Options

Yahoo! is the "Sears" of the internet.

Wasn't Yahoo the creators of Captcha? Yeah that thing, supposedly meant to keep chat bots out of chat rooms yet the chat bots still remained while you, the real person had to verify you weren't a bot every time you wanted to enter into a chat room.

If Yahoo bought Google or Facebook, they would have found a way to damage those platforms as opposed to those becoming big as they did. Google for example was a big threat to the portal model and while Facebook complemented it more, I suspect Yahoo would have found a way to screw it up.

Better reasons why than everyone saying "Google happened:" 1. Too much spam and forced ads within email 2. Homepage became a flea market of information and FILLED with ads 3. Yahoo focused on ads; not people thus the user experience changed 5. Gmail offered a streamlined; easy to use product that didn't force you to PAY to remove the ads/banners 6. Yahoo focused on 3rd party content to fill their pages which led to more spam, ads, and nonsensical info (once I saw 12 posts on Kim Kardashian on their homepage... WTF?) 7. Google's suite of products were easy to use on a smartphone/tablet thus leaving Yahoo in the 90s

Yahoo is one of the best example of how if you don't follow the market the market will not follow you.

My first experience with Yahoo! was in the chatrooms for kids and some stranger asking me if I like older men. That place really was the wild west of the internet. Weird to think about how we all remember the 90's so fondly, when in reality we just didn't know how many freaks were around us until the internet connected us and information started flowing faster

Anyone old enough will remember, when the internet was still new and novel, it was so much fun. Nowadays it’s ingrained into the fabric of just about everything, but back then….there was just something so great about it that doesn’t really exist anymore.

2:59 “David and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” sounds like it could be the title to a early 2000’s movie.

I left Yahoo Answers for Quora because Quora actually has people that know what they're talking about and Yahoo Answers is full of idiot 12-year-olds that only make fun of the question and don't answer it. Plus someone kept flagging every question I asked just for fun and did not get in trouble for it. Plus most of the "top answers" were the most stupid ones. It was just so frustrating! Also, my goodness, web browsers looked SO ugly in the early 2000's.

Actually Yahoo still has been one of the main internet-searching-engine here in Japan

I feel like a HUGE reason that wasn't pointed out here was the PR disaster following a 2013 security breach that affected basically every single Yahoo account registered at the time, which Yahoo proceeded to not inform the public about until 2017. It's a wonder they were able to survive something like that!

After my Yahoo email getting broke into several times and getting literal ads in-between my emails I finally cut ties.

Well their "journalism" certainly doesn't increase their value

I actually didn't experience the internet until February of 2000. I had purchased my first PC during 1999, and just didn't know enough then to even attempt to go on-line. I felt it prudent to wait until after the whole Y2K debacle died down. My wife and I were in a K-Mart in January of that year, and at the check-outs they had these "Blue-light" internet cd's available. They promised free unlimited access to the internet along with a free Yahoo e-mail account. I installed the Blue-light software, endured The Judds singing a song in a K-mart commercial that played every time you went on-line, and viola, I was on the Yahoo home page with my free e-mail. That was my introduction to the world wide web. Great video! Took me right back!

I was really into Yahoo Answers when I was a teenager back in the late 00s/early 10s. Sure, it had a lot of trolls and idiots, but it was really the biggest and most accesible anonymous forum at the time, Reddit before Reddit basically. It had communities, an upvote/downvote points system, customizable profiles and avatars. Back then that was all you could ask for and It was fun. I left cause it simply got tiring. Too many flame wars and stupid people running rampant in the website. Plus better options were already starting to surface.

I expected you to say "Jerry Yang and David Wahoo" or something

Yahoo was my first email at 10 years old 😳 I still use it for general store emails. Kinda felt like I was forced to make Gmail just to keep up with today.

To be fair: Yahoo Finance was probably one of their more financially successful ventures.

I worked at a yahoo headquarters doing some construction. The employees had a plush setup. Breakfast and lunch were catered and the had a fully stalked kitchen. Employees had headphones and laptops payed for by the company. Was definitely a pampered place to work.