Hacker News Reader

This article is a great snapshot of a piece of IT history. Knowing that Yahoo almost bought Google in 2002, today I'm glad the deal never went through.

The merger surely would have been a boondoggle. I imagine the big beneficiary of that would have been Microsoft - if they managed to get their own act together.

The article is right that this came down to execution.

I remember managing ad campaigns (around 2005-2006) on AdWords, Overture and (starting at that time) MS AdCenter. AdWords was just great to use compared to the other two. With AdWords it's relatively easy to manually or automatically manage a campaign of 30,000 keywords and hundreds or thousands of adverts. Overture's UI was simply painful even for a handful of adverts.

MS's offering as I remember required Windows or IE or something so we tended to avoid it altogether.

Interesting. The bit about GoTo.com becoming Overture, which preceded Adwords was news to me.

I guess I subscribed to the often told story that Google invented "text ads for search keywords".

How Yahoo Blew It (2007)