What Happened to Yahoo
August 2010When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be.What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company.
- ▪August 2010When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world.
- ▪It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be.What went wrong?
- ▪The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company.
Paul Graham — Essays files mainly under blogs. We currently carry 219 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Paul Graham — Essays |
| Canonical URL | http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html |
| Publication time | Not provided by source |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-26T08:49:07.854Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-26T08:49:31.809Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. August 2010When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be.What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company. They were already very visible when I got there in 1998. Yahoo had two problems Google didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company.MoneyThe first time I met Jerry Yang, we thought we were meeting for different reasons. He thought we were meeting so he could check us out in person before buying us. I thought we were meeting so we could show him our new technology, Revenue Loop.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Paul Graham — Essays.