Search Wormhole: What Was Before Google? Yahoo! I Found the Answer!

Before Google turned search into an instant, algorithm-driven answer machine, the internet looked more like a phone book that had a nervous breakdown. Enter Yahoo! (yes, with the exclamation point, because this was the ’90s and punctuation was branding).

Founded in 1994 by Stanford grad students Jerry Yang and David Filo, Yahoo! wasn’t really a “search engine” at first—it was a giant web directory, lovingly hand-sorted into categories by actual humans. Want news? Click “News.” Looking for cat pictures? Hope you guessed the right folder, because there was no algorithm holding your hand. It was basically two grad students trying to organize the entire internet with a label maker.

People actually used this. For years. Until Google arrived in 1998 with PageRank, which said, “Forget browsing folders—let’s just figure out which sites people actually link to.” Suddenly, Yahoo!’s carefully curated categories felt like Blockbuster on the day Netflix launched: quaint, but doomed.

In a bid to stay relevant, Yahoo! went shopping. They bought GeoCities, Tumblr, Flickr, Broadcast.com (how Mark Cuban got rich) and a small mountain of other web properties, most of which they proceeded to fumble spectacularly. Today, Jerry Yang and David Filo are billionaires many times over, happily investing in startups and philanthropy while their old company is mostly remembered as a cautionary tale.

And speaking of Yahoo!’s spending spree… next week in Search Wormhole, we’ll answer the burning question: “What was GeoCities?”