Before Google's rise in the late 2000s, Yahoo was the king of the internet. Its search engine and email services were used by billions of users around the world. However, after Google's arrival, its shocking decline was witnessed by everyone.
In 1990, two Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, began working on a school project that led to the creation of a revolutionary search engine. Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim was the first to recognize the potential of Larry Page and Sergey Brin's search engine and made his first investment of $100,000 in Google in 1998.
That same year, Larry Page and Sergey Brin approached Yahoo and other technology companies to invest or buy the project. The Google founders, who also invented the Page Rank system, approached Yahoo and offered to sell their search engine (now known as Google) for just $1 million, but Yahoo unfortunately turned down the offer.
In 1990, Larry Page and Sergey Brin offered to sell Excite to Google for $1 million, but Excite's CEO George Bell also rejected the offer.
In 2002, when Yahoo realized its mistake in rejecting the offer, it tried to buy Google. Yahoo founders Jerry Yang and David Fellows gave the company's CEO Terry Semel the green light to make an offer to the Google founders.
Soon after, during a dinner with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Semel asked them what they wanted to do with Google, to which they replied, "We don't know."
When Semel offered to buy Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin demanded $1 billion, but the search engine founder later raised the price to $3 billion and the negotiations failed.
In 2002, Yahoo tried to buy Google again, but now they knew that its founders were reluctant to sell the company because Google had already begun to emerge as a powerful force.
Google had found a unique business model with its AdWords model that would shape the future of digital advertising and solidify the company's place on the Internet for years to come.
Stunned by Google's rapid success, Yahoo tried to buy them again, but after the deal fell through, it bought Inktomi, a search engine that used parallel computing technology to search for pages on the Web.
However, Google's growth was continuing at a rapid pace, and it soon emerged as the king of the Internet, while Yahoo, on the other hand, was nearing its decline.
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