How Yahoo escaped its Verizon death spiral and became profitable again.

https://www.theverge.com/podcast/895221/yahoo-jim-lanzone-scout-ai-sports-finance-open-web

This is very long but I found it interesting.

Search stuff is about 2/3rds down.  Yahoo is 3rd as a search destination.

Saw that and skipped it based on the title. Maybe I'll go back and give it another look

>Yahoo is 3rd as a search destination

That's a bit of a surprise, but I guess it makes sense.  There are a lot of people who started using Yahoo decades ago and probably never stopped.  I still use their email.  I just visited the home page for the first time in a long time and I have to say it is relatively clean and simple for 2026. 

>it is relatively clean and simple for 2026

What news pages I happen to follow to Y are fair-to-good, too.

Yahoo News and MSN News are good ways to bot avoid the worst of the ad-infested media sites and to get around paywalls. I'm not sure why but it seems like a lot of publications allow more of the article to be syndicated than they allow to show on their own sites.

If I'm trying to get a bit out of the bubble of my usual sources, I go to one or the other.

If I'm trying to get way out of my bubble, I go into the belly of the beast. Worth a look just to know.

If I'm trying to figure out what's really important right now, I read The Onion

I use Yahoo news for my daily quick scan of what's happening, it has a good variety of sources and no paywall.  It's a good aggregator and not tied to snoopy apps like Google news or Apple news.

I liked how Lanzone touched upon the search engine wars of old, and Mighty Yahoo's "original sin" of letting Google take over their web search and setting up their own doom.

But I also liked hearing that Yahoo is profitable now that they are privately held.  Like so many search engines from those days an IPO was the kiss of death (like NBCi), but there is still a place for a portal if it's done right.  Yahoo is still a huge destination and can make a good profit on ads it all depends on how you do it and how you present it to the users.