It’s always easy in retrospect, of course.

Great article at Wired on how Yahoo blew the search race.

“Terry Semel was pissed. The Yahoo CEO had offered to buy Google for roughly $3 billion, but the young Internet search firm wasn’t interested“

Not only that, Yahoo had helped make Google a household name by using Google’s search results up until 2004. It’s gotta hurt.

“At Yahoo, the marketers rule, and at Google the engineers rule. And for that, Yahoo is finally paying the price.”

Also interesting snippet from Rich Skrenta:

“Heck, I tried to buy Google for AOL in 1999. I had no authority, having only been at AOL 2 months after the acquisition of NewHoo. Dave Beckwith, VP of Search at Netscape and I visited Larry and Sergey in their Menlo Park garage headquarters. Dave was being cagey so I asked Larry flat out — how much? Larry’s reply: “You don’t understand. We don’t want to just get rich ourselves. We want to make our family and friends rich too.“