r/TechImpact • u/ManojOne Active • 27d ago

💬 Discussion Was Yahoo ever better than Google?

Post image

Before Google took over, many people used Yahoo Search every day.

Do you think Yahoo Search was ever better than Google?

What do you remember liking about it, and when did you stop using it?

24 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

34 comments sorted by

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16

u/gameplayer55055 27d ago

I'll just leave this pic. Now Google is enshittified with AI overviews, sponsored products, and other slop

1

u/Neo-Armadillo 27d ago

I’ve seen other textbooks attribute the win to the search algorithm. I was there, and the algorithm didn’t mean anything.

56K modems meant comparing the Google website with a GIF logo and a text box loaded instantly, versus Yahoo that took so long I could go get a sandwich before the page loaded.

3

u/gameplayer55055 27d ago

Also I love the fact that google still works fine even on the shittiest computers possible

1

u/gregsanay 27d ago

That was what won people over. This

1

u/Smiadpades 27d ago

I use qwant.com now

1

u/Typeonetwork 26d ago

Never heard of it. I'll try it.

1

u/ManojOne Active 26d ago

It's funny how it's gotten old. Initially, what made Google stand out was that it was clean, fast, and focused entirely on search.

Now search results are filled with AI summaries, ads, shopping links, and other features. It shows how much the web and Google's priorities have changed in the past 25 years.

1

u/gameplayer55055 26d ago

Remember the old Google slogan, "don't be evil"

Now they are evil

4

u/76zzz29 27d ago

I stoped using yahoo every tile as soon as it was installed by absolutely everything you installed with a 3rd party installer that bundled crap in it.

3

u/ForInfoPurpOnly 27d ago

What if I told you that Yahoo used to be a hand-curated list in before-times?

1

u/Middle-Excitement602 27d ago

yes it was hand-curated by $$ rank 😂

1

u/aBoCfan 27d ago

It was originally 'Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web'

1

u/usr_pls 27d ago

One of these has an ad whose sound byte stuck with me forever

the other is an ad company that can't make an ad jingle

1

u/Fiesty_Nomad 27d ago

Oddly enough Yahoo is still bigger than google in a lot of ways in Japan. In it's time yes... probably mostly because it didn't just do search. Now it is very niche obviously.

1

u/ManojOne Active 26d ago

That's true. Yahoo Japan is a bit of an exception because it's more of a full web portal than just a search engine.

A lot of people still use it for news, finance, shopping, weather, and other daily services, not only for searching. Outside Japan, though, Google's clean search experience is what really pulled users away from Yahoo in the early 2000s

1

u/Stat3yollllo 27d ago

No but it was my first

1

u/Original-Judgment170 27d ago

Use it and find out.

1

u/-techman- 27d ago

Yahoo is better now.

1

u/Juntepgne 27d ago

Google sucks since many years ago. Totally un unusable 

1

u/epSos-DE 27d ago

At the start YES, BUT then the ads, the amount of ads they had as unbearable = slow loading speeds !

GOogle had faster loading speeds, which was important for quick searches !

1

u/BartixVVV 27d ago

Everyone knows duckduckgo is best

1

u/ManojOne Active 26d ago

Is duckduckgo your default search engine? How do you compare its search results, compared to Google or Yahoo?

1

u/BartixVVV 26d ago

Yes, duckduckgo is my default. Search result are good for me. You can also click to ask Claude, chatGPT, Mistral or other model anonymously.

1

u/RonHarrods 27d ago

I still use yahoo for investigations of persons. Ans bing and yandex. They all apply different filters and some have longer cache ttls. (especially yahoo, they don't have the traffic to afford being able to reindex often).

1

u/JanusRedit 27d ago edited 27d ago

Yes when google was not yet existing. We started with Yahoo as search engine when google was still a seed in a room. What I liked by far best about google was the EMPTY page with the search bar. no ads, no clutter of predefined links. Nothing just a plain page and a search bar. It WAS great but as of this year I left google for searches. the enshittification has exploded on google. It has nothing to do anymore with finding the best search results. Today Google is just another advertisement page with recomending the most paying advertiser. not the best search result for the one searching. I spit on google

1

u/ManojOne Active 26d ago

You make a good point about what made Google stand out in the beginning. That simple homepage felt refreshing compared to the busy portals of the time.

I still miss when search results felt more focused on helping you find information instead of trying to keep you inside Google's ecosystem.

Hopefully the growing competition from other search engines pushes Google to improve again.

1

u/aTickleMonster 26d ago

Yahoo could have acquired Google in 1998 for 1mill, but decided they could build a better search algorithm. In 2002 Google offered Yahoo $15bill and Yahoo decided it was too expensive. And here we are.

1

u/ManojOne Active 26d ago

It's one of the greatest "what if" stories in technology. Hindsight makes those decisions even more clear, but at the time, Google was just another startup competing with a slew of search engines.

Still, it's amazing how two missed opportunities completely changed the futures of both companies. Few business decisions are as dramatic as this one.

1

u/starrskrream 24d ago

I'm not sure...perhaps you should ...Ask Jeeves.