I generally have a high level of respect for Danny Sullivan of Searchengineland.com but this is just obnoxious.  In an article entitled “Revisionist History: Bartz Claims Yahoo Was Never A Search Engine” he addresses an interview with Carol Bartz (new CEO of Yahoo) from the New York Times.  His first line gives his point.

Yahoo has “never been a search company.” Astounding, in that that this is not true.

He then goes a little off topic before returning to his point by saying…

But part of me doesn’t like history being rewritten, especially by a CEO who should know her own company’s history. Yahoo was indeed a search engine. It was the very first “feature” that Yahoo offered. Long before email, or IM, or Yahoo Sports or Yahoo News, there’s was Yahoo the search engine.

Search was Yahoo’s origin story. To say Yahoo was never a search engine is like saying Superman wasn’t originally from Krypton or that Spider-Man was never bitten by a spider.

Yes, at first Yahoo’s search was powered by human editors, rather than machines. By 1999, the majority of search engines out there used human editors as the basis of their search. When machine-based search took over, Yahoo shifted along to that eventually, spending plenty for its own technology.

Here’s something to think about.  Did you know that the term “Calculator” once referred to a person.  In the times before electronics you would hire a “Calculator” to do mathematical work (keep in mind this was at a time where many didn’t have even an elementary school education so the job was in high demand).  The term eventually came to stand for those little devices on our desks because they replaced the people who once did the job manually. 

So if one of the companies that employed these human “Calculators” was still in business today would it really be accurate for them to claim they were the “first calculator business”?  I don’t think so.  Because our understanding of the term is completely different from the reference they’re using.

Back to Yahoo, the original Yahoo search engine was “human powered.”  It was what we would now call a directory.  So if anyone is wrong here I’d say it’s Mr. Sullivan.  Because our understanding of the term “search engine” (crawling the web and using an algorithm to produce results) is completely different than what Yahoo was when it was founded.

I’ve not been the biggest fan of Ms. Bartz stewardship so far (This quote was stupid at the time and even more stupid now).  But she’s absolutely right here.  The one thing Yahoo has been from the start is a destination portal.  A starting point to the web.  Search, as we know it, wasn’t part of their business until they farmed it out to Google. 

So if anything this deal with Microsoft is more in the tradition of the company than trying to have their own search engine ever was.

Addendum: Via Techmeme I saw this blog which responds to the same interview as above by saying...

Whoa, hold on there, Carol! You don’t get a fifth of the search market by not being a search company! You don’t develop things like Site Explorer and Search Suggest and BOSS without being a search company! You don’t put a search box front and center on your homepage without being a search company!

Yes, we know Yahoo ceded search supremacy to Google years ago, but it was still most definitely a search company. Yes, we know Yahoo started as a directory and dropped the ball by outsourcing search to Google, but it was most definitely a search company after that. Please don’t try to revise history in an attempt to make MicroHoo seem less like a horrible, horrible mistake

Now, in my weaker moments  I'll admit that I too have played word games to try to make someone look bad (like the author is doing above).  But that doesn't make it right.

The truth is we refer to companies by their primary business.  No one would say Microsoft is a "Hardware Company" even though they make various peripherals.  So in saying Yahoo was never a "Search Company" she clearly means it was never the company's primary focus.  And she's right, it never was.  Not even after they dropped Google (as the author claims).  In fact, Yahoo dropped Google in the middle of Terry Semel's tenure as CEO and he described Yahoo as "a media company" and even pursued objectives such as funding Internet only video programming. 

In truth he admitted to having very little interest in the technology part of the company and only took Search back from Google because they started making loads of money and that made him look bad since he'd allegedly had the opportunity to purchased Google and didn't (which isn't entirely true since Larry Page and Sergey Brin kept raising the price on him).