Imagine how different the world might be today if yahoo had bought google and tanked the fuck out of it. The whole modern web would be different. Perhaps the social media era would have never come to pass.
If not them, then someone else would have taken the mantle. Judgment Day always arrives, WWIII/Eugenics Wars will still happen... it just gets delayed in some timelines.
This is actually the good timeline. People hate google for their unsavory shit nowadays, BUT!
They actually had a very positive and important role in advancement of open source and open platforms. Chrome itself became dominant because at the time it was better.
Without google we would have an even worse situation
I still use Yahoo Mail. They offer disposable addresses with a suffix you can choose. I like it better than putting extra characters in Gmail addresses, because you can actually delete those Yahoo addresses.
Yahoo Japan is also a Y! fork that's still doing well.
I have three yahoo email accounts I still use, the oldest from about 1997 and surprisingly, the spam folder on that one rarely gets anything. (The other two are leftovers from when you had to get a yahoo account to make a geocities site). I really like the disposable addresses. Luckily I signed up back when you could have 10 on one of them. Then they ditched it for free users, but brought it back with the three limit. But I got to keep my 10.
Excite was my jam though. I was sad when I lost my excite accounts.
I couldn't tell you how long it's been since I used Yahoo! to search for anything, but it looks like it's still around! I still have an old yahoo mail account I use just because I've used it for so long lol
Mark my words: I think it’s making a bit of a comeback given Google’s enshittification. They’ve also been acquiring ISP email services and showing other signs of growth. I wouldn’t be surprised if it re-appears as an IPO in the next few years.
All search engines suffer from enshittification because the web at large does. Switching search engines won't help escape it, Google's results are getting worse because the internet as a whole is. Bing's and DuckDuckGo's results are just as bad. And unless someone comes up with a reliable way of filtering AI generated SEO crap from searches, it's only going to get worse.
