I. Market Domain: Search Engine Industry The search engine industry covers firms operating search-based internet sites and search engines displaying ads. Their services are normally offered free of cost and their income comes from ads (i.e., " paid click.& quot; when users click ad links). Search engines rely on numerous free services like news, e-mail, entertainment and social networking for attracting internet users (Clyde, 2000).

A. Historical Significance: Analyze historically significant pivot points or factors that led to dramatic changes and innovation in the business environment of your selected market domain.

The memory extension and hypertext concept was introduced in July 1945, with the publishing of As We May Think by Vannevar Bush in The Atlantic Monthly (Seymour, Frantsvog & Kumar, 2011). Bush insisted that scientists collaborate to develop a knowledge pool to aid all of humanity. This was followed by Gerard Salton (considered the founder of the modern search technology) and coworkers at Cornell and Harvard coming up with Salton’s Magic Automatic Retriever of Text (SMART), which encompassed key concepts such as Term Frequency (TF), vector space model, relevancy feedback mechanisms, Inverse Document Frequency, and term discrimination values (Seymour Frantsvog & Kumar, 2011). His work ‘A Theory of Indexing’ describes numerous tests conducted by him, which continue to form the basis of modern search engines (Seymour Frantsvog & Kumar, 2011).

Ted Nelson:

In the year 1960, Ted Nelson came up with the Project Xanadu aimed at creating a computer network using a simple user interface which resolved the issue of attribution and similar social issues. Three years later, he coined the word ‘hypertext’ (Aaron Wall, 2017). Whilst Nelson was working on broken links, complex markup code, and several other issues linked to conventional HTML (hypertext markup language) on the World Wide Web, Ted's work actually inspired the World Wide Web (Aaron Wall, 2017). However, the precise reasons for Project Xanadu’s failure remain a debated subject.

Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANet):

The year 1993 witnessed the launch of the earliest few hundred websites, most of which were based in college campuses. However, long before these came into existence, the world’s foremost search engine, Archie (short for archives), was developed by McGill University student, Alan Emtage, in the year 1990 (Aaron Wall, 2017). The engine effectively resolved the data scatter issue through combining a regular expression matcher and script-based data gatherer to retrieve file names that matched user queries (Aaron Wall, 2017). Basically, it can be envisaged as a web filename database; the filenames would be matched with user queries. ARPANet ultimately resulted in the creation of the internet.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP):

Tim Burners-Lee was a household name in the industry prior to the World Wide Web, when people largely shared data through FTP (Aaron Wall, 2017). File-sharing required the establishment of an FTP server. An individual interested in data retrieval had to use FTP clients (Aaron Wall, 2017). Though the process was effective with small groups, fragmentation increased with increase in data quantities.

The foremost website - http://info.cern.ch/ - went online on 6th August, 1991 (Barrel, 2007). The site described the World Wide Web concept, guided individuals in setting up web servers, and provided browser ownership-related information (Barrel, 2007). Further, it was the earliest Web directory in the world, as Berners-Lee retained a website list (Barrel, 2007). Additionally, he developed a Virtual Library, the earliest web catalogue and authored a book ‘Weaving the Web’ on the World Wide Web’s creation. The year 1994 saw the institution of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) (Levene, 2013).

Google Inc.

Google Inc. was founded by Stanford students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, in the year 1998. Their goal was marketing Google Search, the world’s most popular internet-based search engine (Aaron Wall, 2017). The two came up with the "BackRub" search algorithm a couple of years prior to the company’s establishment (Gilbert, 2009). The Google search engine enjoyed swift success, with the growing firm moving a number of times prior to ultimately establishing headquarters at Mountain View, California, in the year 2003 (Sutherland, 2012). After this came a period of swift progress for the company; the very next year, it made its first public offering and soon became one among the biggest media corporations worldwide. It launched its Google News service in the year 2002, Gmail (email service) in the year 2004, Maps in the year 2005, the Google Chrome web browser in the year 2008, and, finally its social network, Google+ in the year 2011 (Aaron Wall, 2017). It became Alphabet Inc.’s chief subsidiary in the year 2015 (Aaron Wall, 2017).

Winning the Search War

Shortly after commencing operations,...

AOL and Yahoo! chose Google as their search partners in 1999 and 2000, respectively. The new millennium witnessed the Google Toolbar’s launch (Aaron Wall, 2017). Since then, the company’s share of the search market has increased considerably, annually.
The new millennium also witnessed the re-launch of AdWords, a cost-per-thousand-based ad-selling program (Aaron Wall, 2017). The service was retooled two years later, with ads sold through auction, taking into account click through rate and bid price (Sutherland, 2012). In May 2002 came AOL’s announcement that it would deliver search-related advertisements via Google. This aided Google considerably in its battle against rival, Overture (Aaron Wall, 2017).

AdSense, a program facilitating the company’s expansion of its ad network through selling targeted advertisements on other sites was introduced the following year (Aaron Wall, 2017).

Going Public

The company employed the following strategy when going public: a 2-class stock framework, with stock shares offered through a Netherlands-based auction. Further, it refrained from giving earnings guidance (Aaron Wall, 2017). However, it was criticized immensely for the apparent conceit it expressed within its shareholder manual (Aaron Wall, 2017). A controversial Playboy interview led to the company decreasing its initial public offering range and going public on 19th August, 2004, at 85 dollars/share (Aaron Wall, 2017).

B. Factors: Analyze the factors that contributed to the obsolescence or dissolution of notable companies in your selected market domain in the recent past. Make sure to discuss both inhibiting and enabling factors in your analysis.

Yahoo Company

During the turn of the millennium, Yahoo!’s stock peak was roughly five hundred dollars/share (i.e., only over 108 dollars/share following splitting) (Vaughan, 2016). Currently, however, the company is being purchased by Verizon for a bargain basement rate - 4.83 billion dollars (Vaughan, 2016).

What happened?

Yahoo lacked competitors at the time of its launch in the year 1994 (Vaughan, 2016) and was quick to become the most popular search guide on the internet. Excite and Alta Vista cropped up two years later, though they were hardly any challenging competitors for the company (Vaughan, 2016).

Rapid technological advancement necessitates leveraging of smart acquisitions when undertaking long-term development endeavors. Consider, for instance, Google’s purchase of Youtube, DeepMind, DoubleClick, and Boston Dynamics or Facebook’s purchase of Instagram and Oculus Rift (Desjardins, 2016). Yahoo’s managers haven’t had much success in making forecasts, have made a few erroneous deals, and have overlooked several lucrative deals (Vaughan, 2016), thereby leading to the company’s downfall.

How did Yahoo do it?

Yahoo invested in search engine technology and its web portal (Desjardins, 2016). The earliest investors of the company experienced a 1,339.4% stock growth at the start of the new millennium (Vaughan, 2016). But with the bubble’s enlargement, the company embarked on an ill-fated journey of erroneous acquisitions including Geocities and Broadcast.com, followed by the .com crash (Vaughan, 2016).

Akin to other high-fliers, the company suffered a bad fall but unlike eToys, Pets.com, and Curcat, it didn’t perish. But Google’s launch proved detrimental to Yahoo (Vaughan, 2016). Also, rather than making search engine engineering investments, the company constantly purchased bad companies and ceased to be a growth firm (Vaughan, 2016). Its sole truly successful action during the last decade was its purchase of an Alibaba stake. (Alibaba is Amazon’s Chinese version). It is an irony that during the past few years, Alibaba alone has ensured Yahoo’s survival. Nevertheless, it has witnessed a series of disappointing quarters (Vaughan, 2016).

One noteworthy low point for the company was the Chief Executive’s 2008 decision to turn down Microsoft's 44.6-billion-dollar buyout offer (Vaughan, 2016). Despite its rejection of Microsoft's buyout, Yahoo dumped its own search engine in July of 2009 for Bing (a Microsoft engine) (Vaughan, 2016). The root of Yahoo’s slow downfall is its prioritization of acquisitions rather than innovation during the dot-com era (Vaughan, 2016). Though Alibaba’s stock purchase certainly proved profitable, no other acquisition did. Its Tumblr and Flickr acquisitions also failed to work (Vaughan, 2016).

Missed Opportunities

Stanford University’s doctoral students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page contacted Yahoo in 1998 and offered to sell their search engine algorithm, PageRank (a rapid website finder), for a million dollars (Desjardins, 2016). The company rejected the offer, believing web users would…