"it seemed like a software company"

Web Yahoo: what went wrong:

"One of the weirdest things about Yahoo when I went to work there was the way they insisted on calling themselves a "media company." If you walked around their offices, it seemed like a software company. The cubicles were full of programmers writing code, product managers thinking about feature lists and ship dates, support people (yes, there were actually support people) telling users to restart their browsers, and so on, just like a software company. So why did they call themselves a media company?"

No one else seems to remember this (the collective web memory being a strange and spotty thing) but when I was studying search engines at university in the 90s, Yahoo was licensing Google's technology.

That's why I used it, pulling great search results (even then) and material from Yahoo's own portal. Eventually when Google became a serious company, Yahoo began using their own version which didn't seem to work quite as well.

Now I know why. Now I also see that they're going to be using a similar licensing arrangement in Japan as of this year.