

How Yahoo Blew It (2007) - luckyisgood
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/yahoo.html

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luckyisgood
This article is a great snapshot of a piece of IT history. Knowing that Yahoo
almost bought Google in 2002, today I'm glad the deal never went through.

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code_duck
The merger surely would have been a boondoggle. I imagine the big beneficiary
of that would have been Microsoft - if they managed to get their own act
together.

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rwmj
The article is right that this came down to execution.

I remember managing ad campaigns (around 2005-2006) on AdWords, Overture and
(starting at that time) MS AdCenter. AdWords was just great to use compared to
the other two. With AdWords it's relatively easy to manually or automatically
manage a campaign of 30,000 keywords and hundreds or thousands of adverts.
Overture's UI was simply painful even for a handful of adverts.

MS's offering as I remember required Windows or IE or something so we tended
to avoid it altogether.

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ra
Interesting. The bit about GoTo.com becoming Overture, which preceded Adwords
was news to me.

I guess I subscribed to the often told story that Google invented "text ads
for search keywords".

