Carol Bartz Says Yahoo Has “Never Been A Search Company”
Carol Bartz said that Yahoo has never been a search company following the recent sellout to Microsoft. I would love to be a fly on her wall to figure out why she said this. Is it to downplay the acquisition? Or, is it to downplay that Google has been pulling out a can of whoop-ass on them.
But as I think back to the original days of Yahoo in the late 90’s (and yes, I was around to see that launch), Yahoo was not a search engine. If anything they were the pioneers in free email service and through their email subscribers, they allowed users the opportunity to connect and network with other yahoo email subscribers through their Yahoo Groups.
If anything, Yahoo was the pioneer in social networking long before MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. And they were also the pioneers of email listbuilding.
I know this for a fact because I created a group in Yahoo in the late 90’s called “Black and Latin Dating.” I don’t know why except I wanted to create a way for people of color to meet. And since I speak Spanish and am African American and single, why not? I used Yahoo’s service to find my targeted audiences and invite them to join my group. In a matter of months, I had 13,000 members in my group.
In fact, here is a tshirt created by one of my Members and he wanted to give them away to active users.
Well, long story short, I left the group after 6 months and Yahoo converted their groups to its current format and the group was lost forever.
I am saying all of this because I remember the beginning of Yahoo and I don’t think I went to their site to locate other sites. I can’t say that I can recall what I used to find websites back then, but I know for a fact that Yahoo never started as a search company but as a social networking community which is why they have such a stronghold today.
Do you feel that Yahoo started as a search engine? An email listbuilding company? Or, a social networking community?
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