It's a case of changing paradigms.

At the time of Yahoo's rise, the way users typically searched the internet (not the web) was gopher. And Yahoo's early approach (categories) was somewhat similar to that of gopher.

The term "internet search" meant something different in the 1990's than it does today.

Yep, Altavista. Before writing that blog post I verified all the facts at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Yahoo! (image hosting is Flickr, blog/social platform is Yahoo-360, other services include Yahoo Groups, Yahoo messenger, GeoCities page hosting, Yahoo Mail, Overture (paid search ads) and other services.

Yahoo! Groups was awesome. One of the best acquisitions they made. Originally written in Python in 1997.

But … wait. They didn't acquire Altavista until 2003, when it was already dead in the water.

Yep, 2003, my bad... But Yahoo still dominated the search anyways. According to December 1999 stats they had 56% market share (while nearest competitor - Excite - had 11%, Google was <1%)

yeah that's what I thought - it seems like they were fairly close to Yahoo before 2003 though ... providing their search results from 1996.

I got connected with the net in 1995. At that time we used Yahoo extensively. We jumped to Altavista a year or so later mostly because it had larger index.

I used WebCrawler in the mid 1990's because it was based on search terms.

Then it steadily declined in quality and I started using Google, not because Google got better so much as because WebCrawler got worse.

No, never. This story is preposterous in the depths it trolls to try to compare Yahoo with Google. Yahoo was a ontologically sorted link graph. Years later, after AltaVista imploded, they picked it up, but to call them a search giant? Ridiculous.

It did. No the 80% but at the end of 1999 yahoo had 56% if the search market while google had <1%. Can't post a prooflink from the phone will do that later