Back in 1995, the internet titan Google was barely more than a concept. Search engines were just starting to really make a name for themselves in the relatively new but growing market of home computers, where a 56k dial-up modem was considered the best technology had to offer. But there was a project that was taking shape in Silicon Valley, and Yahoo was preparing to change the internet forever.

Jump forward to 2009, where the internet is delivered across the globe by search engines, yet there are many out there that have completely forgotten about Yahoo. How did the market of surfing the web that Yahoo built kick the Silicon Valley innovation to the curb, left to drown in Google’s shadow?

Past

Yahoo, which stands for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”, raised nearly $34 million in stocks after its first two years of existence when it became a publicly traded company. The dot com era was born, with Yahoo leading the charge. It gradually evolved from a highly successful search engine into more of a web portal, offering email services, online games, GeoCities (which many of today’s web developers got their first taste of coding web sites), and much more. On its home page you could search for specific information, log in to your email account, see the latest news in a variety of categories, check your local weather, and read about the latest hollywood rumor before anyone else started talking about it. While Yahoo’s stock was steadily climbing, a new name was slowly emerging, riding the tail end of the dot com boom.

Google was born in 1996, just two years after Yahoo hit the world wide web. Google’s team focused on quietly developing a complex and sophisticated algorithm to improve the lackluster yet industry standard search results everyone was used to from a search engine. The Google.com domain was registered a year later. Now Google owns the internet search market, and has a large stake in nearly all aspects of the web (YouTube, Gmail, and Google Maps, to name a few). They have even released their own browser, and are ready to battle the iPhone with Droid, their mobile phone OS. Next year we will be introduced to Chrome OS, a web based operating system that hopes to conquer the netbook OS market.

Present

What happened to Yahoo? They were once unbeatable in the game that they created. They made the rules, and dominated their competition. Google didn’t originally plan to take on Yahoo; instead they made their own rules and started a new game.

While Google slowly built up their empire, Yahoo became complacent with the services they offered. While they built a great model for success, their downfall was that their business is grounded in a technology that is developing faster than it can be marketed. Once their brand was established, the road was paved for Google to create a new brand. When Google did that, Yahoo essentially became yesterday’s news overnight.

Future

It’s hard to imagine that any web presence will ever be able to confront and beat Google at their own game. If history does in fact repeat itself, they won’t have to. Someone will eventually write their own rules and create a new game.