Subject areaChannels and tools
Also known asYahoo
Yahoo! was the first major web portal. Jerry Yang and David Filo, two Stanford University PhD students, founded it in 1994 as a list of their favourite sites, under the name «Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web».
Unlike the search engines that came later, it was a catalogue compiled by people and ordered by category. In 1999 it bought GeoCities; it later lost the lead in search to Google, and in 2017 its core business passed to Verizon.
Its story shows a shift that marketing still lives today: from a choice curated by people to an order decided by an algorithm.
An example
In 1996 a company that wanted to be found online asked to be listed in the right Yahoo! category: a person reviewed the site and decided whether to accept it.
Enrico Giubertoni. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: you may quote, translate and adapt this entry with the author’s name and a link, stating any changes. For commercial use, write to info@enricogiubertoni.com
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