While looking for up-to-date fantasy basketball stats, Jerry Yang and David Filo scoured the Internet for hours. They thought that there should be an easier way to find internet pages and came up with a site named “Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web.” They manually compiled a large amount of websites under different categories for easier user search. The site became very popular, and they changed the name to something more palatable: Yahoo. They had one issue though: Yahoo, like many websites, was not profitable. A venture capitalist firm met with the Yahoo creators to discuss business opportunities. At the time, there were two schools of thought on eCommerce. One side argues that the Internet was a new way to advertise and market on a scale unseen before. The other side wanted to keep the Internet a non-profit utopia where information was shared freely without advertising. This was a success, and advertisers wanted more and more ad space in front of these millions of new users.
With this popularity came competitors. Its most formidable rival was a new site named Excite. While on the surface a similar concept, it used far more sophisticated technology. Whereas Yahoo was compiled by humans, Excite was pure software; a precursor to modern search engines. Both began making their sites flashier and kept adding more features. However, in this competition, they lost sight of their original objectives: search. It was still hard to find information. With this came Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, also Stanford students, founded their own search engine. They founded Google on the notion that the Internet was a big popularity contest. Every time a link was clicked, it would give the site more votes for usefulness. The sites with the most votes were considered the most relevant and useful. Google skyrocketed in popularity, nearly crippling Stanford’s internet. An Excite investor arranged a meeting between Excite and the Google team, hoping to secure Google’s search engine technology for themselves . It would secure a win for them against Yahoo. They ended up walking away from the deal as search wasn’t profitable. Brin and Page ended up securing funding from investors and began their work. Google created AdWords, a system that allowed advertisements to appear as separate search results. This made Google extremely profitable. Google has now secured almost all of the Internet search engine market share. Google’s IPO resulted in many people becoming rich.