On April 25, 1996, on American TV, in leading programs such as the Late Night Show by David Letterman, and then also in Saturday Night Livea strange commercial debuts: we saw a precociously bald young man struggling with impossible reports until he sits in front of a pc, go to yahoo.com, search for “hair” and afterwards he is seen wandering like a proud long-haired man in the streets. Slogan: “Do You Yahoo?” (video).
Yahoo! was a startup, launched a couple of years earlier by David Filo and Jerry Yang, which seemed destined for enormous success. And he probably would have if Google hadn’t arrived in 1998, and six years later Facebook. But in 1996 the Web had just started and Yahoo! (with the exclamation point and colorful and nice graphics) was the site to start from to explore the Net: a search engine, but also an email servicebut also a news service, a sports service and a platform for advertisements.
When around 2000 the decline began it was said that the cause was that Yahoo! he had done too many things to do them all well: but then Google did not limit itself to the search engine, and added an email service, but also a news service, but also a platform for advertisements. And so we understood that the problem wasn’t how many things Yahoo! diversified the offerbut in the fact that Google did them better.
That spot remains one of the earliest examples of the attempt to tell the Web to a large audience such as television.