Yahoo passed on buying Google for one million dollars
In 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin offered their young search engine to Yahoo for $1 million, and Yahoo said no. Four years later it tried again, negotiating for weeks before settling on a final bid of $3 billion, which Google rejected. That second miss is widely ranked among the costliest strategic blunders in corporate history.
Yahoo began in January 1994 as a hobby of two Stanford electrical engineering students, Jerry Yang and David Filo, under the name Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web. It was a hand-built directory arranged in layers of categories, not a searchable index. Renamed in March 1994, it later acquired a playful backronym, Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle, though the founders said they mostly liked the slang meaning of yahoo as rude and uncouth, borrowed from Gulliver's Travels.
Growth was dizzying. After listing in April 1996, the shares rose 600 percent within two years, and by 1998 the directory drew 95 million page views a day, three times rival Excite. In 1999 Yahoo spent $3.6 billion on Geocities and $5.7 billion on Broadcast.com. The stock peaked at $118.75 on 3 January 2000 and sank to $8.11 by 26 September 2001.
Missed chances kept piling up. Yahoo relied on Google to power its own search from June 2000 before building its own technology. In February 2008 Microsoft bid $44.6 billion, then raised the offer to $47 billion; Yahoo held out for more and Microsoft walked away that May. A carousel of chief executives followed, including Scott Thompson, whose tenure lasted about 130 days, and Marissa Mayer, appointed in July 2012. A 2004 scheme letting companies pay for guaranteed search listings, indistinguishable from ordinary results, annoyed marketers and users alike.
The end of independence came cheaply. In July 2016 Verizon agreed to buy the core business for $4.83 billion, a fraction of what Microsoft had offered, and revelations about massive data breaches later cut that price by $350 million. Yahoo is now mostly owned by Apollo Global Management, with Verizon retaining a tenth.
Source: Yahoo
