Published at October 23, 2007
in Google.
Back in 1995, when co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page met at Stanford University, they didn’t like each other much. But by January 1996, they were collaborating on BackRub, a graduate project analyzing how back links could be used to improve search results.
In September 1998, when Google Inc. opened for business inside a Silicon Valley garage, the Web entered its second phase. Unlike thousands of now-dead dot coms that preceded it, Google proved that you really could give stuff away and still make a profit. By allowing Net users to determine where pages ranked in Google results, the search engine was arguably the first Web 2.0 application.
Published at October 23, 2007
in Yahoo.
Some hobbies take on a life of their own; others change the world. In early 1994, Stanford Ph.D. students Jerry Yang and David Filo posted a list of their favorite sites on the Web. The exact date they posted the links is lost to history, but we do know the list’s original name: “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” By April ‘94 it had a new tongue-in-cheek name: “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle” or Yahoo for short.
Yahoo represented the first attempt to catalog the Web, offering directory-style listings of every site that mattered–with tiny sunglasses marking sites deemed truly cool. When providing exhaustive coverage became impossible, Yahoo was reborn as a Web portal, combining the directory with search, news headlines, instant messaging, e-mail, photo hosting, job listings, and assorted other services. As other major portals like Lycos and Excite died off or were consumed by bigger fish, Yahoo continued to expand. Though surpassed by the Google search juggernaut, Yahoo may have memorable Web moments yet to come with co-founder Jerry Yang
