Once Upon a Time on the Web: The Golden Age of Librarians

Recollections from my Yahoo years

When I joined the Surfing team at Yahoo in April 1998, the company had been public for about 2 years and the stock was soaring. PageRank was already a work in progress, a Stanford student project, but Google referred only to a comic strip character, first name Barney.

Yahoo Sunnyvale campus from the Bay Trail, 2007

Yahoo's earliest employees found themselves looking at improbable stock option wealth. Not just for paying off their college loans, but for buying houses in the Bay Area, and furnishing them with the array of goods and goodies that Amazon and eBay and others were scaling up to sell online. There was a steady flow of big box packages delivered daily to my colleagues’ cubicles, in the typically drab Silicon Valley office complex where Yahoo had set up shop a year or so earlier. The Web 1.0 boom was in full swing. Ordinary humans were using their computers to buy things on the internet.

When I arrived at the featureless building on 3420 Central Expressway in Santa Clara (predating the Sunnyvale campus above), after a long and tiresome commute from green and golden Berkeley, I entered a new world of work. The end of the century, and already in my early forties, I was to become an knowledge worker in the tech industry, riding the information superhighway to a life I had never imagined. The websurfers - they were catalogers really – had been hired to organize the outrageous proliferation of websites that were coming online daily - and make them discoverable the old fashioned way - through an orderly system of categorization. This work was also sometimes called taxonomy, sometimes ontology, and later we learned to think of it as content curation. (Note: We knew that Yahoo was an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle, coined by one of the Stanford electrical engineering grad student founders.)

Once inside the building, I was led to a vast room with rows of open cubicles built onto dingy carpets with crepuscular lighting. By the spring of ‘98, there were maybe 30 or 40 surfers already at work on the Yahoo Directory. For many, this was their first job out of college, a few had newly minted library science degrees, or past library experience. For others, their areas of ontologic responsibility mapped to their domain expertise (in many instances, this was based on their major in college). Within months of my arrival, Yahoo began to produce versions of the Directory in other languages - Spanish, also Catalan, Chinese, Japanese, French, and more.

It was not yet entirely obvious that 50 or even 100+ capable humans would never be able to keep up with the cambrian explosion of content that was the public internet in those days. We'd even created a category called "Personal Homepages" and it grew vaster by the day—as we debated whether homepage or website should be one word or two. And oh the experiments that were coming online, making the WWW look less like a web of documents every day we logged on, more like a cabinet of marvels. And there I was, with a catbird seat to all the glorious shenanigans.

I can still taste the double rainbow of joy the day I came in to be interviewed by my soon to be colleagues, and the tears of disbelief behind my eyes. Like when Dorothy enters Oz and the world turns technicolor. My colleagues were young, quirky, eclectic, and smart. Maybe Yahoo’s first CEO was close to my age, but everyone else was a decade or more younger. I met a young woman with a prosthetic leg and a friendly pug named Maisy. On the wall behind her CRT monitor, in her section of the allée of cubicles, she'd hung a series of her past prosthetic legs, in sizes from tiny to small to midsize child to almost fully grown. Next door, the desk was strung with glittering Christmas lights. There was a furry tarantula in a lavish cage living on one person's desk down the end of the row. The avenue of cubes was a veritable museum space of maps, posters, memorabilia, tchotchkes, and original art.

The Surfing team, aka the muscle of Yahoo, was led by a young woman of great wisdom and gravitas, a Brahmin raised in Kansas by a family of mathematicians and academics. She was a Stanford grad, a college friend of the founders, and employee #5. A competitive volleyball player, who exuded certainty, sound judgment, and self-assurance, she once explained that her given name, Srinija, meant goddess of prosperity. Her nickname "Ninj" for ninja, reflected her bold style and decisive speed. I was entranced, amazed that I had back-doored my way into this not quite legendary circle. Boldly, I’d contacted Srinija directly, explaining in email that I’d been studying the Directory and its methodology as a contract cataloger for a competing, long defunct search engine, and was already a fan, well-versed in the websurfer’s art.

My Yahoo! badge in 2011

And so began more than a decade of Yahoo years: The golden age of librarians came and went. Some of the earliest silver surfers went on to other pursuits, and joined other companies, although I know of at least one who is still employed by Yahoo, more than 25 years later.

As wealth accumulated, Yahoo began to acquire startups and build expansive new online services. Ask me sometime about sitting next to a smug young Paul Graham in Birkenstocks and cargo shorts, watching his bogometer ding as online orders came in. This was months after the acquisition of his startup Viaweb, a pioneering store platform, which was to power the earliest instance of Yahoo Shopping. Ask about bringing on Geocities (inelegantly) and Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com in 1999; eGroups a couple years later, after some homegrown success with Yahoo Groups; and then the big one—Overture in 2003, not long after they’d acquired the Alta Vista search engine from CMGI.

Y!2K mason jar, Y! Research Berkeley mug, Yahoo! 2000 Oktoberfest

It'd become obvious that Google was a competitor to be reckoned with. And that search advertising was the model. And yet, despite the emergence of tags and folksonomies (a lovely short-lived term of art) circa 2005, and the warnings of Clay Shirky and others that Ontology is Overrated, the Yahoo Directory endured, and continued to grow, atop a search box that'd become a faster, more reliable way to find needles in the haystack.

By around 2005, Google had IPO’ed and was ascendant, doing it their way. In the sobering aftermath of 9/11, Yahoo had begun a compensatory series of Web 2.0 startup acquisitions and acqui-hires. The sometimes botched onboarding of Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming, and quite a few others from 2005-2008, brought pockets of brilliance and web 2.0 style product insight and engineering, into what had become a bloated VP-heavy organization that was neither media company nor tech giant, neither decisive nor visionary.

Along came Yahoo Research (which had been Overture) and Yahoo Research Berkeley, an interesting entity for mobile development on the other side of the Bay. In 2006, Yahoo birthed Brickhouse (near South Park), another doomed experiment in creating independent pockets of product innovation. For me, these were fun years, working in the company of inspiring individuals. There were internal hackathons and public extravaganzas, collaborations, brilliant prototypes, and relationships forged that would endure for decades, and lead to new and compelling future startups. Also there were layoffs. And still, the center would not hold.

Broadband was becoming more evident, YouTube launched, and the first iPhone was released in June 2007, without an app store. I still really loved my Nokia n73 for sending photos straight up to flickr. The mobile internet was imminent, but we were still talking in terms of moblogging, vlogging, and RSS feeds.

To be continued…