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Whats Yahoo ever been about, though?

Even in the early days their search index was run by a third party (OpenText, then AltaVista, then Inktomi, then Google, now Bing) and most of their major properties like Yahoo Mail and Store were acquisitions like Four11 Rocketmail and Viaweb.

Just seems like Yahoo has been a long series of acquisitions.

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Yahoo was about organizing web sites in an easy to use hierarchical structure, not about searching. If you wanted to learn about "python" the programming language, you'd click computers->programming languages->Python and get a nice list of vetted sites about python. If you wanted to learn about python snakes, you'd click animals->reptiles->snakes->pythons and get another list of vetted sites about snakes. And back in the days when the web was small and search sucked, this was a great way to find sites. Yahoo has been floundering ever since the web grew too big for this approach to be practical, and Alta Vista worked out how to make search work.

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