Full Complement

There was a time when I thought Yahoo was one of the most innovative, promising companies on the Internet. These days I am not so sure it has much of a future left. Yahoo appears to headed the way of AOL.

I have always been critical of people who use AOL. AOL always seems like a portal for the least comfortable with technology, providing gimicky user interfaces and keywords as a crutch to navigate the depths of the World Wide Web.

I formally used many of Yahoo's services, from GeoCities to MyYahoo to its email services. I even recommended Yahoo as an alternative to search as opposed to Google.

Yesterday, Yahoo officially abandoned its search to Microsoft of all players. Am I missing something? I thought they had a business built around a good search engine. It was certainly a second option to Google. But now they've scrapped it for Microsoft's new Bing search. This is mysterious to me: is Bing really that much better than what Yahoo already had? I was under the impression that Yahoo was a search portal with complementary services and advertising. Shows how little I understood its business model.

There are no real compelling reasons to visit Yahoo anymore. I still have occasional forays into the Yahoo universe, using their email as my primary spam repository, Yahoo Groups for an old baseball league, and Yahoo Pipes to filter RSS feeds. I have migrated from Delicious to Diigo over this year, and I occasionally stop by Flickr when I'm really bored.

Yahoo bungled the advantage with search long ago, and this recent decision seems the final death blow. Yahoo appears to be heading the way of AOL, and soon both may be an afterthought--a place we talk about in memory like Compuserve or Prodigy or GeoCities.

I've heard that every percent of search traffic is worth one billion dollars. For Yahoo's sake, I hope that's not that case. At this point I can't imagine anyone moving all their search tasks over to Bing, but it's not the first time, the leaders in tech have changed hands.