“Thousands of people were producing new Web sites every day,” recalls Filo of Yahoo!’s early days. “We were just trying to take all that stuff and organize it to make it useful. As it became more popular, it became pretty clear we would have to get more people involved.”
From day one, Yang and Filo realized that if they were going to stick around for any significant length of time, they were going to have to adapt from being a one-trick pony to being a comprehensive company with a wide range of services. It was with that goal in mind that the two began to put into place their strategy for growth, embracing it at every step of the way.
“We worry about staying competitive as well as continue to come up with new things,” says Yang. “What I can say is that look for Yahoo! to continue to push the envelope on what we can offer for free, as well as a continued focus to develop the Yahoo! set of services around the world.”
Yahoo! progressed from being a simple list of interesting sites on the Internet to being a searchable directory of more than 14 key categories, including Arts, Business, Entertainment, Science, and Health. But while in the early days, the site relied on Yang and Filo to personally sift through and document each of the sites, they realized that with growth that type of system would no longer be feasible.
That is why Yang and Filo decided early on to integrate the AltaVista search engine into its directory. Now, Yang and Filo would no longer have to personally track the increasing number of sites online. Instead, they could rely on content-based searches – a growing trend down the road.
That was a starkly different approach than the one taken by one of Yahoo!’s early leading competitors. The McKinley directory offered not only lists, but also reviews of web sites, in an attempt to offer a more comprehensive and useful online service. Yang, however, felt that strategy would only result in stagnation.
“Okay, just think about it for a moment,” he says. “I mean, just look at this. Web sites change all the time; this one is not the same as it was yesterday. So how often are they going to review their reviews? Will those reviews really be current and meaningful? I mean, with a few thousand sites it might be practical. But with 100,000 sites? How many sites can one reviewer review in one day? I mean, it would take an army. We get a thousand requests each day to have sites added to our list.”
The major difference between Yahoo! and its competitor was not the website reviews in and of themselves, but rather the strategy and foresight behind them. “I think in this business you really have to prepare for the scale involved,” says Yang. “And if the business model won't scale up, then in the end it won't work.”
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