Where did Yahoo! go wrong?

Yahoo! is one of the first-ever websites, ever.
It has been around for almost as long as I have been, but for some reason, at some point, it lost its popularity.
Now you have these big giants, the social media sites, google, all these sites that are now the most well-known sites in the world, while not as many even know about the existence of Yahoo!.

Where did they go wrong?
At one point they were the biggest, but then they lost it, and now, as far as I know, are not even one of the top websites in the world.

 

They should've stuck to being a search engine. And branch out into other things like email, shopping, etc. the way Google did. This is yahoo back in 2000: https://web.archive.org/web/20000229123340/http://www.yahoo.com/ Tell me if you can clearly identify what they were all about back then?

 

Classic old-school design.

They seem then to basically be about the same things they are about today - everything that the public could find interesting.
It seems they kept their core concept throughout the years and just improved on it. While companies like google who started out with a very specific niche grew and expanded outwards, Yahoo! did not, they remained with what they were doing from the beginning.
I may be wrong, but that's how it seems to me.

Yahoo! by no means is a small or unknown company, but being one of the first websites ever, one would think that they would be bigger, that they would be one of the leading ones today.

 

Yahoo was huge for a while, and so were websites like Lycos, Excite, AOL, etc. Yahoo took on a lot of debt acquiring other companies, and they lost focus of their primary goal, which was search. Google was a new player, but their search was un-matched. In a world where people are searching for things, Yahoo just could not match them with what they were looking for. Google focused on one thing and one thing only, and that was search. They garnered loyalty, users, and a following by focusing on providing people with exactly what they are searching for. it was only in the future when Google expanded to other things.

 

Yahoo did not give the user WHAT he wanted, the WAY he wanted it, WHEN he wanted it.

 

I think they only made 3 big mistakes.
1. They did not allowed pop access in email when gmail was launched with free pop access.
2. They did not changed their web email interface when gmail was launched with a cleaner and easier web interface.
3. They did not increased email storage space when gmail came out with large storage mail.

Free email was their most popular product, more popular than anything else.
They did not understood the importance of that and kept focusing on the search engine blaa blaa.

At this point, search engine algos are good enough, we get good enough results, sometimes one or two results lower, but its ok.
And this was also true 5 years ago, for google, for yahoo, for msn/bing.
All they need is a mechanism to "stop" spam from popping into first page search results. That is all, results are good enough.

But they keep fixating on this search product like mad men, updating things every now and then, and what not.
Sure, search is the gateway to internet.
But who sits and keeps admiring gate?
Its a gate, not the house...

 

Very interesting!
Even more that now they don't even really have their own search do they? They use Bing search for their results, which is Microsoft.

 

They use bing search now because MS bought Yahoo

 

Looks like craigslist. Crazy to think I was ~1 month old when yahoo was looking like that. damn.

 

The only reason - Google was better in everything, understanding of user's needs, personalisation, speed.

 

@NicoleW
I agree with you to some extent

 

Yahoo was failed to maintain market competition. Google invested too much in technology, Specially in Adsense/adwords where yahoo not even added more countries in their allowed list for advertising.
People peoples joined google because of cheap Advertising and to earn via adsense. Google captired almost 80% of world websites via adsense. Now you can see the results.

 

@9xlinux
I agree with you. Lots of people were waiting for yahoo to allow ad publishing in their countries, but it never happened.

 

All of the above and I would also add that their greatest error was to drop their directory.
That was what made them famous. That was what made them unique.

 

While Yahoo gave people results they (Yahoo) find worthy, Google presented query-like search giving people feel they are actually a factor for that search results. That makes them special, and they keep using Google so much.