Yahoo’s search results in the U.S. and Canada are now fully powered by Microsoft’s Bing. The announcement came on Tuesday, a little more than a year after the two tech powerhouses agreed to combine search forces in order to compete with Google. And while many are lamenting the passing of Yahoo Search, one of the Internet’s true originals, I’m not among them.
Yahoo was launched way back in 1994 as a human-powered search site. Forget spiders and search algorithms: Yahoo, in its first iteration, was basically a list of hand-picked Web links, organized into categories. You had to drill down through the categories in order to find the information you were looking for — and you often found it complete with a written description of the site you were about to visit.
The process was slow and while it was thorough — for a time — it quickly became apparent that trying to keep track of the explosion of Web sites was a job for which no mere mortal was equipped. A computer, or better yet, an army of computers, was needed instead.
Yahoo tried to adapt, inking deals with Inktomi, Overture, and even Google, but the once-mighty site lost ground as more and more Web users went gaga for Google. In the years since, Yahoo has been unable to shed its old-fashioned image. People fondly recall Yahoo’s days as a dominant search provider, but they do so while typing search queries into Google.
