Yahoo and Google’s Business Models

Source and verification limitations (2026-11-02): The original text contains explicitly identified comments by Robin; the rest is tagged Wu Jun/Dedao. A matching original manuscript was not obtained. The AOL monthly fee, Yahoo’s free access, the evolution of search, and the hypothetical account of a world without Yahoo have not been independently verified item by item. The claim that search has undergone only one qualitative transformation is the author’s judgment, not an established conclusion of technology history. The original post did not include a directly comparable URL for the same text. ---- #Can your perspective shape an industry? #Do not let what you have learned constrain your thinking #Look at the world and business models differently Although Yahoo is no longer in its prime, it and its founders would still be considered among those with the greatest influence on the internet industry’s development. The business model chosen by an industry’s early leader has an almost decisive influence on that industry. Without Yahoo, the internet might have remained a luxury for the wealthy for a considerable time, much as cars once were. Yahoo was not the first internet services portal. Before its establishment, AOL was already providing ordinary users with internet access. But its business model resembled a traditional telephone company’s: it sold a modem to each person wanting to get online, then used telephone lines for dial-up access. Its pricing was similar, too: US$20 a month, paid by the user. Yahoo thought differently. It was concerned not with how users got online, but where they went afterward. To encourage more people to access Yahoo, it tried to sustain operations by earning money from businesses rather than users. It even offered some free access numbers. Yahoo and its followers thus cultivated a large market and stimulated the emergence of e-commerce, social networks, and other internet-based business models. (Robin’s note: “In the internet era, users and customers are clearly distinguished. Users use your service; customers pay you. They can be the same people or entirely different groups. Look after your users and build a large, loyal, highly engaged user base, and someone will naturally pay for it. Hence the popular internet saying: ‘Take the wool from the pig, and get the dog to pay.’ Once this makes sense, countless internet business models become possible.”) Yahoo founder Jerry Yang’s foresight lay not only in recognizing the right direction for the internet industry and pursuing it, but in seeing from the beginning the importance of organizing online content. ---- Yahoo began by building a directory of websites for internet users. At the time, there was almost no technical foundation for internet search. Traditional information retrieval methods, led by Professor Salton at Cornell University, were designed for library documents and archives and did not work well when applied directly to the internet. Yang and Filo were not information-processing experts and had no time to research the problem. They did not consider automated ways of integrating and searching the internet, choosing the fastest approach instead: creating directories manually. With very little content online then, they quickly built a directory covering most of it. This approach, however, created a problematic tradition for Yahoo’s later development: it still trusted manual approaches more than Google did. As online content grew beyond what could be indexed and cataloged manually, Yahoo adopted Inktomi’s automated search engine. When the late-1990s internet boom swept Silicon Valley, doctoral students Larry Page and Sergey Brin also felt they should do something. Information retrieval researchers use two objective measures of search quality: recall and precision. Compared with earlier engines, AltaVista solved the coverage—or recall—problem, but had not made a breakthrough in precision. Page and Brin decided to research this area. At the time, academic and industry research into search precision remained within Salton’s keyword-weighted framework for retrieving library documents. Some researchers recognized links between web pages, but habitual thinking led them merely to add these connections as another signal and patch existing methods, with limited results. Page and Brin did not come from document retrieval research. Without those mental constraints, they could approach the internet and its search problems from a fresh perspective. Asked how he came up with PageRank, Page said: “We thought the entire internet looked like a huge graph. Each website was a node, and each page link was an arc. I thought the internet could be described as a graph or matrix, and perhaps I could turn that discovery into a doctoral dissertation.” That is how Page and Brin invented PageRank. Many practical problems remained, but both were hands-on people, unsatisfied with proving its correctness in theory. They built the Google search engine themselves to demonstrate its practical value. Google largely solved the problem of search precision. Although today’s Google and other search engines have advanced considerably since the original Google, these improvements are essentially quantitative. The only qualitative transformation in search engines so far was Google’s replacement of AltaVista. The word Google derives from the very large number “googol”: 10 to the power of 100. Nothing in the universe actually exists in such numbers—not even all its elementary particles. Page and Brin chose the name simply to convey how large their search engine was. #得到 #吳軍 #矽谷來信谷歌方法論