Technical Quibble

[bartl]

Yahoo did not achieve fame as a search engine (I think the first major search engine was lycos.com). It was a web directory; classified web sites. You had to submit a site to them for it to be listed. I believe that it started going downhill when it started charging 3 figures just to be CONSIDERED for listing, with no guarantee that your site would be listed in their directory.

Lycos.com was replaced by a series of other web engines, all having the problem of being too easily fooled (when I was briefly webmaster at Wiley Publishing, I managed to optimize their website for the then-prevalent search engines in an afternoon; I found out that several of their competitors were using the John Wiley name as an internal search term), when Google came out with both a difficult to spoof engine, and a directory entirely in RAM making searches lightning fast compared to other search engines. And has made a living for a LOT of people whose sole job is to get others' sites near the top of Google listings.

[FunkyGreenJerusalem]

He didn't say they did start out as a search engine - where would get that contention?

He said they that thinking they appeared to start as a search engine was a reasonable assumption to make about a reasonable persons perception.

It's right there in-between all the words he actually wrote!

[badMike]

He said they that thinking they appeared to startThat sentence fragment might go down as my all time favorite message board response.

BTW: Steven wrote, "Yahoo, which originally made its name with the original superior search engine," means exactly that the site first became famous for it's search engine. Bart's saying it got famous for being a directory first, not a search engine. I don't know if that's right, but that's what he's contending.

Yahoo still has a directory service one has to pay to get into. I think it costs like 2 to 3 hundred bucks.

[Steven Grant]

BTW: Steven wrote, "Yahoo, which originally made its name with the original superior search engine," means exactly that the site first became famous for it's search engine. Bart's saying it got famous for being a directory first, not a search engine. I don't know if that's right, but that's what he's contending.

Bart's technically right but I don't really distinguish between a directory and a search engine. They're identical in function; the latter's just a more technologically sophisticated and capable version of the former.

- Grant

[bartl]

Bart's technically right but I don't really distinguish between a directory and a search engine.
As for the first, hence the subject, "Technical Quibble". As for the second, in the earlier days of the Web, Yahoo was very useful. If you were looking for a specific website, then the search engines were OK, but if you were just looking for a TYPE of information, or you were looking for the home page of a corporation, then Yahoo's web directory was very useful. When they started to get picky, and charging for listings, they just weren't covering enough of the web to be useful anymore. And when Google came up with a more accurate search engine, so much the better. I think that Ask.com and Wikipedia have taken the position that Yahoo directories used to have (looking for general information about something), and Yahoo has branched into other services.

[FunkyGreenJerusalem]

That sentence fragment might go down as my all time favorite message board response.


It was meant to sound gibberish, but not that much gibberishy.