Old Yahoo!

[Androo]

Yeah, for some reason they still got the old yahoo on their server from 5 months ago. i don't think u'll care, but maybe someone out there is in desperate need to view the old yahoo site:
OLD YAHOO!

[kendall]

i remember yahoo when it was a search engine, not a web portal.

[Y Dobon]

Originally posted by kendall
i remember yahoo when it was a search engine, not a web portal.

Yahoo has never claimed to have been a search engine, even since its days when pages were being served up from akebono.stanford.edu, an SGI Challenge S box (circa 1994).

It has been (and continues to be) the premier WWW web directory.

The first meaningful WWW search engine (post-gopher technology) was DEC's AltaVista. The second (and current reigning champion) meaningful WWW search engine is Google.

[edX]

web directory - search engine

what's the difference? it's still a search engine as far as i'm concerned. except that my pachell dsl just became sbc yahoo dsl and i'm already having such problems that you can expect a 2000+ word rant on the quality (and i use that word loosely) of their service. let's just say that the kind of excited they have me so far is way below the celebratory level of screaming yahoo. If they don't get my problem fixed soon, i'll be screaming yahoo when i dump them. right now they are showing the same level of service that one would expect to lead to the record loss posted by aol.

[Y Dobon]

Originally posted by edX
web directory - search engine

what's the difference? (snip)

A search engine rather indiscriminately sniffs every single IP address on the Internet to analyze web site content. Said content is indexed by a database, typically related to text-based content on the site's hierarchy.

A web directory is similar to your local phone company's Yellow Pages: a category-specific list of select, submitted sites for a particular subject matter (e.g., automotive parts stores, bookstores, dentists). Web directories, for better or worse, can claim to be selective in their listings.

That's why the Yahoo, ahem, portal is now both.

Question 1 might be: "What is Kodachrome?" (Yahoo Google). Question 2 might be: "Photo labs in Los Angeles metropolitan area".

[kendall]

actually, webcrawler came a year or so before altavista. so did lycos and excite if i recall. i remember being excited about altavista going public but unfortunately, hotbot stole their thunder and it never came to pass.

in anycase, whatever you want to call yahoo web directory/search engine, its mainpage used to be as bare as google.com is now and thats what i was refering to.

[Y Dobon]

Originally posted by kendall
actually, webcrawler came a year or so before altavista. so did lycos and excite if i recall. i remember being excited about altavista going public but unfortunately, hotbot stole their thunder and it never came to pass.

in anycase, whatever you want to call yahoo web directory/search engine, its mainpage used to be as bare as google.com is now and thats what i was refering to.

Again, I will reiterate that I am referring to meaningful sites. Webcrawler was never recognized as a premier search engine, whenever it came about. Lycos and Excite certainly followed AltaVista. Hotbot was the great flash in the pan than never, er, panned out. Again I will reiterate that AltaVista was truly the first meaningful search engine, and that Google was the second.

Yes, Yahoo once had a nice clean homepage. Most web usablility pundits mention the consistency of Yahoo as a benefit. Changing your freakin' user interface every six months is not good.

However, in the mid-90s, Yahoo was not a Google-like, one-text-field-only style search engine site like Google is today (A. you are wrong, and B. this wasn't available at the time). What it was at the time, as well as the technology and web usage was indeed a main page with a dozen or so hyperlinks to other major categories.

[kendall]

actually, you're wrong. i can tell you everything that came before altavista.

you had excite (architext) in 1993

yahoo in early 1994

webcrawler in early 1994 which i consider was one of the first "search engine" by your definition. lycos, infoseek and altivista ripped off a lot of its features.

lycos in mid 1994

infoseek in late 1994

and then, not last, but certainly behind a lot of others, altavista in 1995.

after that came hotbot in 1996 and google in 1998.

im sure there were a handful of others a long the way but these are the ones that i remember.

also, look up "search engine" in any of the for mentioned web sites and yahoo will always come up in the top five. not bad for something that's not a search engine according to you. you can argue semantics until the cows come home but if it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, it must be search engine of some kind.