I don't know how Yahoo spied on their users, privacy wasn't that big a thing in the early 2000s.
But just look at the difference between the Google homepage and that of Yahoo from 1999. Google was a simple "search" box, Yahoo was cluttered with tons of stuff, including ads.
What made Google successful, besides being very effective as a search engine, is that it didn't have annoying ads, trivia and dubious content. Times have changed, but while you may want 1999 Google back, you probably don't want 1999 Yahoo back.
> privacy wasn't that big a thing in the early 2000s.
I mean, it was. But encryption was a joke (and still is, to great degree) and we all just lived with plaintext over TCP everywhere. IRC, email, web, etc. In fact, during '93-97 the thing I remember most about the internet was just how paranoid everyone really was at the time. It was still a mostly technical user base and there was this general intuition that the potential for this to all go sideways is right there. But we were all on local BBSes and local ISPs and looking at personal web pages and logging on our friend's IRC server. It was sharing bootlegs with Grateful Dead fans, with a cautious eye towards the Feds and the AT&T and IBMs of the world. After 2003 or so, this world ceased to exist. Tracking, spam, privacy invasion became normalized.
> Google was a simple "search" box, Yahoo was cluttered with tons of stuff
I remember people on Slashdot begging Google to not clutter their front page. There were a few times that I believe Google introduced new features and there was a serious backlash. I want to say Google was paying attention (Slashdot was huge at the time), but who knows.
> while you may want 1999 Google back
What strikes me nowadays is just how much Google has always sucked. I don't mean the company (they suck too). I mean PageRank. The thing we always held in unquestioned high regard. This thing we used to think is really clever turns out to just be a thing people could game to improve their visibility. Then Google realized this and now it's a tool Google uses to control the internet. I've spent a good portion of my career on this cargo cult nonsense we call "Search Engine Optimization." The rules change all the time, and only Google knows what those changes are. The biases are ever-shifting, in order to keep people on their toes and to reinforce Google's control.
But the part of PageRank that sucks is that if you do any sort of search that isn't a Wikipedia page, a Stackoverflow or Quora question, or a Pinterest image, you will quickly land into the mire of shady Russian Twitter/Instagram rehosting sites and scam pages. And this is all within the first page or at best the 2nd page of results. That is godawful results if you really stop to think about it. Google can't tell you anything that Wikipedia doesn't already know.
Agreed. I remember when someone first showed me Google's search page. It was so uncluttered it was shocking. I didn't notice anything about the quality of search results, or how they compared with Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos or the rest. Just that it was so clean and uncluttered.
Yes, Google's search page was a work of art that would make Edward Tufte proud.
What we didn't know then is that Google would achieve exponential growth to reach trillion dollar status by surreptitiously harvesting each user's search queery history, tracking their browsing histories by IP address, scanning their gmail, surveilling their movements via android, and putting it all together to achieve an advertising monopoly the likes of which Hearst, Pulitzer, Beaverbrook, Ogilvie and Murdoch could only ever dream about.
All without the cost of employing a single journalist.
Privacy has always been a concern, but it used to be something more physical that involved sealed packages, curtains and cash payment. Privacy-minded people simply didn't share sensitive information on the internet, they treated everything on the internet as public.
Privacy on the internet wasn't that much of a thing not because privacy has changed, but because the internet has changed. It is now everywhere and used for things that used to be unthinkable back then: banking, official documents,... An internet connected coffee pot (not a teapot) used to be a joke, they are now in every (online!) shop.
But just look at the difference between the Google homepage and that of Yahoo from 1999. Google was a simple "search" box, Yahoo was cluttered with tons of stuff, including ads.
What made Google successful, besides being very effective as a search engine, is that it didn't have annoying ads, trivia and dubious content. Times have changed, but while you may want 1999 Google back, you probably don't want 1999 Yahoo back.