Gates Explains Microsoft's Need for Yahoo

eldavojohn writes "Perhaps it's obvious to you and perhaps you'll be pleasantly surprised by his answer but Gates revealed to CNet why Microsoft needs Yahoo. From his response, "We have a strategy for competing in the search space that Google dominates today, that we'll pursue that we had before we made the Yahoo offer, and that we can pursue without that. It involves breakthrough engineering. We think that the combination with Yahoo would accelerate things in a very exciting way, because they do have great engineers, they have done a lot of great work. So, if you combine their work and our work, the speed at which you can innovate and get things done is just dramatically more rapid. So, it's really about the people there that want to join in and create a better search, better portal for a very broad set of customers. That's the vision that's behind saying, hey, wouldn't this be a great combination.""

Comments

Re:Brute force and ignorance

[Teilo]

There was no real quality of search results when that fight took place. It was a different era, with little more than keyword lookups. I totally disagree. When Google first appeared on the scene, they had two things that nobody else did. The first was speed. It was jaw-droppingly fast. Nobody was that fast. Not Yahoo. Not Altavista.

Second, was a design decision: That search results would contain every word you typed. No more of this +term nonsense. This made things very simple for users who don't care to learn a search-term language.

The result: happy users.

After that, they hit hard on designing good algorithms, and hired the mathematical talent to do it. Nobody else treated search with so much science. This made users even more happy. Google had the most relevant results.

So - Google won because, from the common end user's perspective, they had a superior product. Period. That plays right into the GP's argument. Superior product = more customers = more ad revenue = the first .com services company to be seriously in the black.