Yahoo wasn’t a search engine? That’s news to me!

I just read a NYTimes interview of Carol Bartz in which she states that “We have never been a search company”. Excuse me Ms. Bartz, but perhaps while you were busy running Autodesk, you didn’t notice that Yahoo pioneered the search industry and was in fact one of the first.

I’m appalled at what has happened at Yahoo over the last couple of years. They’ve lost their direction and have squandered away the lead they had in the industry. It’s sad and its wrong in a lot of ways… mostly for their shareholders.

If you’re interested in the real history of Yahoo and how they built their search business, Danny Sullivan has written a story about it here complete with some early 1998 TV ads from the search engines of the day.