Story of the Failure of Search Engine Yahoo

Search engine Yahoo, the sensation for world in the late 90s. This is the story every entrepreneur in the world must know. The story of over confidence. The story of underestimating opponent. Yahoo was the first search engine that the word has ever seen. But as we know getting to the top is easy but remaining at that position for long is quite hard, very hard.

Search engine Yahoo was created by two college students back in the year 1994. And within two year it went public because it was one of its kind. Yahoo provided every service search engine, e-mailing, audio streaming and etc. But after initial success yahoo never seemed to get back on track.

The first search engine yahoo :-

It was founded in 1994 by two college students Jerry Yang and David Filo. Yahoo was one of the pioneers of the early Internet era in the 1990s. The company has grown rapidly to become a full-featured Web portal with a host of services covering most user needs with the search engine Yahoo Search around which was grafted Yahoo Directory, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News or Yahoo Finance to name just a few of the many services offered by Yahoo.

In the early 2000s yahoo was the most visited website in the world. Now you all must be thinking that how the most successful website has gone down in no time. Actually this all happened because of mismanagement. Yahoo was the first search engine the world had ever seen. But few bad decisions and they are now out of the race.

Search engine Yahoo experienced slow death:-

By saying slow death we meant that the management was not even aware of the thing that Yahoo is going down the track. And as well all know failure of one is the chance for other to grow. Same happened in this case. Yahoo failed and Google stepped up.

In the year 1998, yahoo had a chance to buy google for just 2 billion dollars but they rejected. Then again in the year 2002 search engine yahoo had chance to acquire google for 5 billion dollars. But again they denied. They said Google is overvalued.

In the year 2008, giant Microsoft offered to acquire Yahoo for 45 billion dollars. This time again the deal was denied by Yahoo hy saying that there value is much more than 45 billion dollar. Irony is this that few years back Yahoo got sold to Verizon for around 4.5 billion and the market value of google is around 500 billion.

Why this failure occurred:-

Actually when we look at search engine yahoo we find that it was created by right means and at the right time. It did all the thing needed for success but the main reason it failed later was because yahoo could not optimize its position in the market, as against the giants of the likes of Microsoft, Google or Facebook.

Was this failure occurred because of lack of innovation?

No, Lack of innovation was not the main reason behind the failure of yahoo. Opposite to this, innovation was the reason yahoo started. Today we see Facebook as the biggest social networking website. But let us tell you that the idea on which Facebook is running was originally Yahoo’s idea.

Yahoo failed because of the competition?

Google, which could be described as one of the major competitor for Yahoo search engine and mailing services, was not the only one on the pie chart. There were other players as well in the market. There was also Microsoft’s Bing and Hotmail, and other regional players as well. And it would be inanity to say Yahoo did not have a competitive strategy in place. Competition was always expected, was always present and was always going to be present.

Failure occurred because of bad management:-

Yahoo had everything. At the time it got public there was a only one way it was going and that was upwards. But bad management had made it harder for yahoo.

Yahoo as we all know rejected Microsoft’s buy-out offer in 2008 of 45 billion dollar claiming the latter is undervaluing Yahoo. The truth is that it was always Yahoo that undervalued itself and every other player’s ability in its ecosystem. Search engine yahoo lost its own value in the process of undervaluing others and overvaluing itself.

Yahoo doesn’t innovated in the later half. While its competitor google got a dominance in the field of internet because of chrome and android. All we can say about yahoo is, it was not a failure it was just someone’s less achievement as compared to others

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