a search and you didn’t find what you were looking for on Yahoo, rather than
just saying, “It’s not here,” or “Go check out this other thing,” he put links to our
competitors, then prefilled the query, so you’d just click on Excite and they
would do a search on Excite for the same thing.
Certainly they don’t teach you in business school to go point to your competitors,
but it sent the right message to the users, which was, “It’s all about you.
We’re going to get you the data you want. If it exists on the Web, we’re going to
find it for you, even if we don’t make money off of it directly.” But it keeps
people coming back because they know we have their best interest in mind.
I think that was a big idea. It was an acknowledgment that you, as a single
Tim Brady 135
company, can’t be everything to everyone. We’re not a walled garden like AOL.
We’re this connection point, and it’s our job to get you to where you want to go.
Livingston: What were the most popular link categories at first?
Brady: The sex category was probably a quarter of everything on the Web. Not
just Yahoo, but everything on the Web. Just like the VHS industry when it first
got going. The Internet was no different in that respect.
There was also a lot of product information. People quickly began to do
research before major purchases—about cars and reviews and things like that.
One of the big things we did in the first 6 months was that we brought
Reuters online. CNN was online at the time, I think, but done poorly—slow, a
ton of graphics, just didn’t get it. And Reuters had this rich set of news that back
then they didn’t get to display anywhere. They would just sell it to people in bits
and pieces, and no one would ever see it in its entirety, and that turned out to
be really huge.
Livingston: How did you handle pornography?
Brady: It’s a tough issue. It was always talked about. It was never taken lightly.
But we were also in support of free speech. It was one of these things where we
were always struggling with “whose responsibility is it?” People come to us to
find information; we’re not displaying the pictures, per se. Is it our responsibility
to find out what age users are before we pass it off, or should that wall be at
the site, etc., etc.
Ultimately we ended up removing all of our links to those sites, after probably
about a year and a half of just struggling with ways to do it appropriately and
responsibly and not really being able to find a good way. At the time the child
protection laws were coming out, but I believe we had pulled everything down

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