[dragonwriter]

> They want to own search once again.

Yahoo! never owned search before. The brief period where Yahoo! Search was an independent, rather than provided by a third party, was after Google became dominant (and Google was the last exclusive provider of Yahoo! Search before that independent period, which ended with the most recent Bing deal.) Before Google, Yahoo! Search was Inktomi (who was later bought by Yahoo! after Yahoo! stopped relying on them), and before that AltaVista (also later bought by Yahoo!)

Yahoo! has only ever owned being the interface to search.

[dec0dedab0de]

I remember both AOL, and Prodigy defaulted to Yahoo, when you had to list your site with Yahoo to be returned in results. When they called themselves a Directory. It was not quite search, but it was their own results, and they dominated the market.

Edit: type-o/clarity.

[dragonwriter]

> I remember both AOL, and Prodigy defaulted to Yahoo, when you had to list your site with Yahoo to be returned in results. When they called themselves a Directory.

Yeah, that was the pre-search strategy that Yahoo! (and others) pursued, and Yahoo! did own that for a while (I'd argue that their focus on such a curated list while search ramped up is what left them behind on search, leading to them relying on series of search providers -- which they kept buying up even after abandoning them as search providers), but they never caught up even when after those acquisitions they tried to go it alone.

So, sure, maybe they want to own search the same way they owned curated-directory-based web information, but that's different from wanting to own search again.

[dec0dedab0de]

Fair enough. Though I would say it still counts as search, whether they're crawling the internet or forcing sites to sign up manually.

I agree that the focus on a curated list is what held them behind, though it may be nice if someone were to provide that today at scale.