Word: yahoo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...canny gambit in what is becoming an increasingly lucrative game. The Web has long since proved that there's money to be made simply by telling people where to go. The veteran search engines--brand names like Yahoo and Excite, Lycos and Infoseek, HotBot and Alta Vista--still dominate the Web's Top 10 traffic lists despite less than stellar performance. The journal Science reports, for example, that the best search engines sample no more than a third of the hundreds of millions of sites in existence. Yet last March, according to the Web research firm RelevantKnowledge, a startling...
...justify Wall Street's love, the big search engines will have to give their audience ever better reasons to stay tuned. Yahoo and Excite understand this, and almost since their inception have been working to transcend their origins, morphing from simple navigation aids into (warning: buzzword ahead) "portals," mega-Websites that are designed to fulfill a wired citizen's every last online need: browsing, shopping, playing, chatting, whatever. "We began with simple searching," says Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, "and that's still a big hit--our Seinfeld, if you will--but we've also tried to develop a must...
Excite feels the same way about itself. Its personalization ploy is its biggest step yet in the race to catch up to its first-place rival. Yahoo and Excite have each offered a modest form of personalization for two years. Yahoo calls its service My Yahoo; Excite's is My Excite. Each loads stock quotes, news flashes and various other tidbits, along with the inevitable blinking ads, onto one customizable page. Starting this week, though, Excite has made personalization the centerpiece of its site. It's a gamble, but one grounded in experience. "People who personalize," says Kraus, "return five...
...Will Yahoo follow suit? For now, Yang's path to portalhood goes through something called Yahoo Online, a full-bore online access service launched last month with long-distance giant MCI. Unfortunately, AOL pretty much staked out the $14.95-a-month turf years ago, and you get the feeling Yang knows it. "MCI is a way of getting our users to Yahoo faster," he says, "but it's just one of many." Like more personalization, maybe? If traffic on the new Excite starts soaring, Levy predicts, "you'll see Yahoo follow suit. The Web's rules are being rewritten weekly...
...famously underperforming Microsoft Network. Later this year--if the Feds don't quash his online ambitions first--Bill Gates will launch Microsoft Start, MSN's reincarnation as a portal site. Microsoft's early Web efforts may have been feeble, but that doesn't mean the Gen-X millionaires at Yahoo and Excite won't be looking over their shoulder. "It's early in the game," says Yang. And Bill Gates tends to win in the late rounds...