Yahoo outsourced search when it was treated as a cost center

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 12:36

   should mention also had to be reinstituted because if you go way back the original sin of yahoo was giving search away to google in june of 2000 there's this myth on the internet that that they were defeated by google because they took their eye off the ball or whatever it was worse than that they outsourced it first to a company called link to me and there were actually others before that And then the market, the crash happened and to get a better deal, to save money on something that was viewed as a cost center search, even though 92% of all, I think sessions on the internet at that point started with search.

2. 13:10

   It was viewed as a utility that was not core. One of the reasons was because there was no business model yet. So what became Overture and then what became AdWords and AdSense for Google didn't exist. All of the search engines, and there were 10 plus of them that were public companies, Ask included, had banner ads everywhere on search results pages. So just imagine how bad that was. So it kind of came from the right place. It just, you know, wound up being something that was really hard to recover from. So generations of Yahoo started to figure out other, you know, ways forward. In the 2000s, while they did some very interesting things in search and other places, it was forays into Hollywood. They had Yahoo Music and, you know, TV and just all kinds of other things. They hired a lot of people from Hollywood. There were then a series of different

3. 13:59

   CEOs. They then went back at Google in the 2010s and tried to go that way. And then eventually selling to Verizon, the mission of the company was to help Verizon in their mission. It turned out that underneath all that, the reason why Yahoo continued to be successful all the years with this huge audience were the places where it was still fulfilling the original mission of the company that jerry yang and david filo had in 1995 which is just being the trusted guy to the internet helping people through the wild west of uh you know that it had become to help them get things done in yahoo finance and sports and news and mail and you know different parts of search and weather and all these places where we still have leading brands that's what the company was doing and so we kind of had the benefit in 2022 23 of of just focusing on the things yahoo's doing

4. 14:49

   well and we we didn't have the burden of first of all being a struggling public company that was hard to make those changes in public is very difficult and second uh to you know just focus on the things that we did really well where we were already successful so that's where our focus went and during that time frame which meant that we spun a lot of things out or shut or shut them