You see, Yahoo and I share a birthday, or nearly so.
We were both given life in January of 1994.
Back then, founders Jerry Yang and David Filo envisioned a web directory.
Yahoo! was once such a household name you’d want to take pictures in front of it.Photo: Justin Sullivan
Its a word salad, a searchable page index, making finding different pages on the still-nascent internet easier.
While I was teething, Yahoo added its first official search function.
This was a time before search optimization.
The directory was a spidered index, organized like any physical library.
The Web was precisely that, a connection tree.
We all feel like gods in our nascent years, and Yahoo certainly did.
Google wouldnt come on the scene until 1998. was at the top of its game.
Remember, this was a multi-billion dollar company.
It could buy the likes of Geocities and Broadcast.com for $3.6 billion and $5.7 billion, respectively.
Those purchases are worth $6.5 and $10 billion in todays money.
But then the Dot Com bubble sapped the company of its reverie.
It spent the next near-decade as the waning star against Googles waxing nebulae.
for $47 billion, but the legacy search index company rejected that initial offer.
Then, in 2012,Marissa Mayer took over as CEO.
This was the same year I graduated high school.
I thought I would turn over a new leaf.
I would open myself up to the world.
Instead, I was running in place, and as it happened, so was Yahoo.
As I was dropping thousands on student loans, Yahoo wasbuying Flickr.
The companybought Tumblr, thensubsequently ruined Tumblr.
It turns out Mayer was a rather dislikable boss known forovert displays of wealth.
The worst was yet to come.
The company was struggling.
It was spending money onstrange work parties, all while bleeding money.
Amassive security scandalshook the company to its roots.
Verizon bought only certain parts of Yahoo and dumped the rest.
Yahoo spent its mid- to late-20s in twilight of regret, but it hasnt stopped bleeding.
Your world was large, but now its smaller and stillsomehowjust as flat.
News from the future, delivered to your present.
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